Quixotic Bravado

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My friend Justin Thorp posted a piece yesterday called “Our current biggest online revolution isn’t user facing…“. Go ahead and read it, I’ll wait.

I had a few other thoughts on this topic, some from life at MQ, some from projects at CD:

Developing “shiny objects” is tempting for organizations because it can be a buzz builder, the benefits seem visible, and is likely to quickly get slapped with a label as “innovative” or “game changing.” At the end of the day however, it’s usually the small and incremental changes — the “unsexy” functionality which is the most useful and provides the most value.

The important lesson for your organization is to find ways to make your stakeholders see the value, or “shininess” in the “dull” features, whether it’s your client, your bosses, or your board of directors. It’s very easy to fall into a trap of trying to hypnotize users into an trance-like state, sometimes fooling them (and yourself) into believing that you’re actually providing more value to the product than some “unsexy” tools of under-the-hood features. What’s sometimes hard is to stand your ground and make a strong case for features that do add value, but aren’t apt to get you a write-up on a tech-blog.

Here’s a quick example that anyone who has worked on the back-end has experienced: Tell your client that half of your development was spent on infrastructure — features that the client can’t make “tangible.” They don’t get it and want something they can “play” with and fight you. If you win, your work is thankless when traffic surges and the application scales without an issue. If you concede, the application grinds to a halt and now the client has nothing to play with anyway.

The next online revolution is distributed. This makes the argument even harder because now these already non-shiny tools and features aren’t serving some centralized application you can visualize, but empowering functionality to an army of decentralized applications and being used in ways a single organization could not conceive of or execute upon. In a fast-moving Internet, where companies are still slow to migrate from “page views” as a performance metric, making distribution shiny is going to take a lot of polish and elbow grease.

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