another critical business lesson from enterprise software development

Another critical business lesson from enterprise software development

Years ago, I worked for a software company. The users complained about it being sloooooooow. As a software engineer, I got tasked with fixing the problem.

Three rules:

• It had to be fast.
• It had to be memory-efficient.
• It had to work lol.

NOBODY cared about how I did it. They DID care about the fact that I took a key report from generating in 8.5 seconds down to 5.5 seconds (35% less time).

Instant? No.

Solve my part of the problem? 100%.

How did I do it?

I found a more efficient approach, then altered it for my situation and made it even better.

Here’s the lesson.

In software, you can make incremental changes by making small tweaks and improvements. However, you only make exponential changes by changing your fundamental approach. It’s a matter of substantially rearranging work to achieve the same outcome.

The same is true in business. It’s the premise behind “10x is easier than 2x.”

The only way to get exponential results is to swap out the engine with a different one that gets the same (or better) results in less time…

I’ve gotten in the trap of trying to do more of the same thing, faster, to get bigger and better results…
And it’s just that…

A TRAP.
It feels safe…
But it’s not.

If you’re anywhere close to red-lining…
Or if you’ve been there for any period of time…

You’ve got to either slow down or
swap
out
the
engine.