Monday, August 28, 2017

How Good is Good Enough?

I can be a perfectionist in some areas. I am passionate about speed when it comes to computer algorithms. Even if I have spent a few days getting some critical function to be 10x faster than it was before, I will often still stay up late if I know I can squeeze a few more percentage points out of it.

But I am also keen to the 'Lean Startup' idea of an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) where you build something that is just good enough without waiting until it is perfect before introducing it to the market. So I struggle with how good a particular feature has to be before I say it is good enough and move on to the next task.

The Didget Management System has a lot of very innovative features that set it apart from other kinds of general-purpose data managers. But speed is its greatest 'Wow!' factor. It can do things thousands of times faster than conventional file systems. It can do many database operations 2x, 3x, or 5x faster than the major relational database management systems. It takes full advantage of multi-core CPUs to make even single operations much faster by breaking them up and running pieces in parallel.

Yet, I have found my biggest challenge has been to get people to commit resources (time, money, effort) toward something that has considerable promise if there is any risk involved. I will show them something that is taking them 10 minutes to do using their PostgreSQL Database and can be done on my system in only 2 minutes and yet have trouble getting them to commit. This is not something trivial that is outside the core function of their business...it is something critical, and still they hesitate. I think this is mainly because it requires change - a step into the unknown.

Everyone knows that risk is the biggest enemy of innovation. All but the most trivial innovations required someone to take a chance and put something on the line to 'make it happen'. Business managers almost always remember some initiative that failed because they tried something out of the mainstream. But they rarely, if ever, know how a passed-up opportunity would have played out to their advantage.

I am keenly aware that in order to convince companies to switch to my system, it has to be a great improvement over their existing solution. When I started this project, I set the bar at twice as good. If I didn't think I could build something that was at least twice as fast, twice as convenient, or had twice the power; I would never have gone far into its development. It has far exceeded my expectations to the point that I think it will be at least 10x better than anything else.

So I plod ahead with the hope that eventually this platform will attract the attention of those innovators who will take a good look at the risk/reward ratio and decide the reward is just too great to pass up. We have some companies that are taking a look at it, but most have yet to do more than dip their toe in the water.

As I look over my list of tasks that are yet to be completed, there are many that are 'refinement' tasks or things that will make features that already work, significantly better. There are others that are features that do not yet work at all and need to be implemented. I have taken the approach to do a mixture of things from both groups. Every time I get one or two new things working, I will go back and enhance one thing that worked before. At the end of the month, I can then say that the product does things it never did before but also does a handful of things better than ever.