Chicken
Getting more productive isn’t really “cost savings,” at least not until you actually do something new
Most “cost savings” metrics we talk about are efficiencies in the future, not actual money in the bank now. If a developer can deploy software more frequently, that can look like cost savings because it eliminates wait time and shortens time-to-market. This doesn’t mean you get new cash deposited into your bank account.
Once you become more efficient, you still have the overhead of all your developers, your costs remain the same. If they code more because they spend less time doing bullshit that’s now automated, then you’re not so much getting money back as getting more with your money.
This is more like “do more with the same” than money in the bank. It’s also the potential to make more money.
But, then you have to actually do the more stuff!
What we really need to know is, given a particular intent, is our IT spending cost effective for realizing that intent, or is it wasteful? (Schwartz)
It could be that what you do with that new capacity is actually meet deadlines and budgets. Which will also likely mean doing less than you originally thought was possible - doing code in small batches versus upfront, waterfall planning every 12 months where you just totally make up the amount of code that will be delivered in that time frame, always over-serving - doing more than is actually needed to, like, look like you’re busy and valuable.
It could also mean that you do new things, like expanding a cargo container tracking business into new ports.
Improving your IT processes, even getting developers and operations people feeling all psychologically safe and knowing what “SLO” means is the first step on a long journey to corporate health. Now, you have to decide how you’ll change the business, make it better, and grow.
I don’t get the sense that most organizations are doing the more stuff very widely, for example, as the survey below shows:
https://flic.kr/p/2hcYSfFMy read here is that business-related problems create most of the challenges to becoming product-centric, a good proxy for THE_DIGITAL_TRANSFORMATION_ROBOT_DOG_MINDSET.
Original programming
If you’re like most people I meet, you’ve had one, singular thought for the past year: “when can I listen to 90 minutes of Coté talking?”
Today is your day!
Here’s a 90 minute talk, more like “lecture” based on my book Monolithic Transformation. It’s the usual from me: tales and suggestion for large organizations that want to get better at how they do software.
Also, you might notice, I have these hosted as the first episode in a new podcast, Misaligned Incentives. I’m doing this with a co-worker, Rick Clark. We’ve wasted hours of time talking about how weird things are inside of large organizations without recording it! The first episode will be up soon: subscribe!
A new podcast is forthcoming there, so subscribe now!
“Wendy’s has some spice taken out of its nuggets”
Popeye’s chicken sandwich spike | Michael Coté | Flickr
Explore cote’s photos on Flickr. cote has uploaded 1386 photos to Flickr.
I spend most of time looking at technology strategy and businesses. Meanwhile, there’s plenty going on in the analog world, as written up by Eric Gonzalez at KeyBanc:
Popeye’s rolled out the new sandwich to each of its ~2,500 domestic stores on August 12th. A week later on August 19th, a tweet directed at competitor Chick-fil-A sparked a social media firestorm estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars in free publicity for the brand. Despite launching with what it thought was sufficient supply to last through the end of September, Popeye’s blew through its inventory in less than two weeks and nearly doubled its Twitter follower base (from ~100K to ~180K) in the process.
Meanwhile, problems in breakfast-land:
Breakfast represents roughly one-third of McDonald’s traffic and one-quarter of sales. It is said to be the chain’s most profitable daypart, relying on its competitive advantages in speed, convenience, and value. However, the morning daypart became a dark spot in the brand’s ongoing turnaround, as the chain prioritized core menu improvements. Breakfast was under-innovated, pricing got expensive relative to the competition, marketing became fragmented (more regional/local than national), and as traffic in the morning slowed, franchisees shifted labor toward other dayparts, leading to operational issues. Because breakfast remains an area of growth for the industry, it has attracted new entrants with improved offerings, and deeper discounting from rival chains.
At such scale and such consumer fickleness, small, even incremental changes can have large effect, even worse change investor sentiment. Can you image being a CEO and having to answer questions like “how are you going to deal with reduced sales due to rival spicy chicken and Twitter strategies?”
Meanwhile, what does it all mean? Well: “there is no such thing as a morally pure fried chicken fast food sandwich” and “A sandwich that costs $3.99 is almost certainly the product of some exploitation.”
Hm. So. Yay…charts of…chicken…?
As Rachel Sugar goes on to say: “there is almost no discussion about life in America that cannot be had through chicken sandwiches.”
Relevant to your interests
If you’re prepared to be in the red for 21 quarters and loose $2.86bn you too can “be like Amazon.” Mistaking “structural transformations of global capitalism for zeitgeisty trends in the history of ideas.” The American Dream is an unhappiness plan: you should measure your worth by looking down, not up.