How I Strive to Balance Technical Excellence with Business Impact

Someone recently reached out to me on LinkedIn and wrote "I’d love to hear how you, in your technical leadership roles at BDG Software and other companies, ensure that the products you develop not only meet technical requirements but also maximize business value."

I spent a while reflecting on the question and working on how to answer it. After a few days, I think I found a good answer and decided to post it here.

For me (and my company) business value, is a technical requirement. It's actually the first technical requirement. If what is being developed for our customer isn't targeted to bring about business value then there's really no point in doing the development.

Now this applies when developing software as a business.

When you work in the R&D space or academia then you're expected to develop things to see if they can be done and then we see what they can be used for.

What can we remove?

Getting into the nuts and bolts of the problem the next major item that needs to be addressed is the removal of stupid. The definition of stupid I'm using is "marked by or resulting from unreasoned thinking or acting" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stupid definition 3). For unreasoned the definition is "not founded on reason or reasoning" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unreasoned).

The process I call removal of stupid has many names "Process Optimization", "Operational Excellence", "Streamlined Solutions", "Business Process Reengineering", "Cognitive Load Reduction" and many more.

There is a reason why I call it removal of stupid and not one of these others. These others primally add to a business. It's rare for any type of optimization or reengineering to remove anything from the thinking or acting of a business. What we end up with is MORE business. And that business now has more thinking or acting before the business can deliver its product (which is what keeps it solvent).

What exactly is removal of stupid? That would be looking at a process that has changed and removing all the parts that no longer make sense.

Sounds simple, doesn't it.