As Q2‘s Chief Technology Officer, Adam Blue drives the overarching innovation strategy to solve current and future customer challenges.
I like Amazon a lot. I make this amazing potato leek soup, and I use a strainer that I can only find on Amazon. It’s a $65 strainer with mesh so fine that under the right conditions, it could part a human being and their soul. I must have that particular strainer because when I strain my potato leek soup, the leftover granular fat in the soup is so fine that it sparkles like glitter when you heat it to service temperature.
But when Amazon was founded in 1994, it didn’t sell strainers. It sold books. Only books. Though Jeff Bezos’ vision for his enterprise was that it ultimately become “the everything store,” he started small. In the early days, a bell rang every time an order was placed and Bezos and his early employees assembled orders and took them to the post office themselves. Pretty humble beginnings for a company with a current market cap of $1.500 trillion, and expected to become the country’s largest retailer in 2024.
Now imagine if Bezos had launched Amazon as the behemoth we know today; if from day one he sold everything from all over the globe, expecting consumers—for whom online shopping was a novelty if they’d heard of it at all—to simply stop going to stores.
Bezos understood that to achieve his long-term vision, he had to start small and deliver consistently against that vision with improvements over time.
I mention Amazon because there’s a fair amount of hyperbole in the tech space today. Every new technology is a game changer, everyone is brilliant and works 700 hours a week and we’re all going to Mars. We might all get to Mars, but I guarantee that there’ll be a lot of incremental steps in space travel before we book holidays on the red planet.
An engineer somewhere is probably working on launching a rocket from an iPhone. In the early days of space travel, the control consoles were massive avocado-green hunks of metal covered in dials, buttons and TV monitors. Each gauge represented a function with a small but crucial role to play in the gargantuan goal of putting a man on the moon, and each had a story, but those individual stories were lost in the overwhelming presentation.
Don’t sweat the small stuff. Celebrate it.
It’s easy for tech companies to get lost in our own metaphorical dashboards. Data is critical; objectives and key results are important. To achieve our own moonshot goals, we need to see the big picture, but equally important is focusing on the small dots that make up that picture. Pick one graph, one gauge, one process or one act—and drill down.
There might be days with milestone achievements. On most days, however, progress toward the overall goal will be fairly limited. Not only do you have to be able to live with that, but you have to turn those small accomplishments into concrete measurable units of value that can fulfill short-term pressures.
Successful engineers understand how to deliver a series of incremental features, components, products or insights that all point in a particular direction. Likewise, programmers don’t write miles of code in one sitting. They write a few lines of code, run the tests, write a few lines of code, run the tests and so on. Nobody ever built a brilliant piece of software by writing a thousand lines of code in a row and then running it.
Apple provides another example of the power of incrementalism. The first iPhone launched back in 2007 and was revolutionary, but it is downright primitive by today’s standards. It could make phone calls and send basic texts, play music and connect to the internet (albeit slowly) but not much else. There was no app store, no Siri, it had a two-megapixel camera and 4 GB of memory.
So, Apple delivered a new device that could do many things that other devices couldn’t do, but it wasn’t as good in certain areas as competing devices.
That was okay, though, because the iPhone improved with every iteration. The hardware got better, the camera got better. Eventually, we got touch ID, which is better than passwords, and then we got face ID, which is better than touch ID. In 2011, Apple introduced the iCloud ecosystem and the move away from owning physical media for music and movies. These were all incremental changes—but don’t underestimate how dependent we can become on those increments.
Small and steady wins the race.
Apple didn’t launch the iPhone with a fully-formed iCloud solution. Like Amazon, they built their product incrementally over many years. In 2007, Apple didn’t have to know what features they’d be offering over the next 16 years; they only had to know that there were problems to be solved.
Similarly, companies today can approach building capabilities in the software (within reason) and then implement features on top of those capabilities, while not predicting what features people will want too far into the future. For my company, we’ve built things at the structural level of the software that—as the market evolved—we ended up using in radically different ways than we ever foresaw.
Regardless of which industry, product or service you’re in, you can give yourself a lot of optionality by taking shorter steps. There’s great power in redefining your institution’s definition of success around small wins—the wins we’re often conditioned to overlook. After all, there are no big victories without small wins.
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