The Best You Can Afford

It’s nearing the end of the year, which is a good time to reflect on things. I have found myself reflecting a bit on adages, axioms, and the like. You know, the “stitch in time saves nine,” “look before you leap” kinds of things. Those little snippets of wisdom that help to convince us to do the right thing.

Software development has a few of these:

• red, green, refactor
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Don’t break the build
• Perfect is the enemy of the good

That last one really started off a train of thought for me. How do we know when we’ve reached “good” and when we’re trying too hard to reach perfect? This is particularly interesting to me as I often struggle with “leaving well enough alone,” to pull out another cliché. I’m not sure of the exact set of circumstances that led to it, but somehow I started thinking about value versus cost. All of that coalesced to this:

The Best You Can Afford

That’s how you know when to stop. When you can’t afford to keep making it better anymore. That is, when the value of what you’re working on isn’t worth the effort compared to the other things you could spend that effort on. (I’m sure that’s one of the worst-written sentences ever, but it makes the point.)

At first blush this seems obvious. We all apply this every day to an extent right? Well, not necessarily. The best you can afford is very easy to confuse with the worst you can afford. That is putting in the least effort possible to just get by. We see and do this all the time.

What, really, is the difference? The difference is in what these two tactics get you in the long run. Aiming for the worst is attractive because it is, somewhat obviously, the cheaper option. However, that obvious cheapness results in, well, results that are obviously cheap. In physical products this can mean flimsy plastic parts and a shorter life span. In software, this can mean more defects, a hard-to-use product, and upset end users. Worse yet for software, it often also means a harder time performing the maintenance tasks that can be more than 80% of the cost and time spent working on the software.

Aiming for the best is harder to justify up front because so many of those costs are unknown. However, the attention to detail means physical products that people love to use, use for a longer time, and will recommend to others. It mostly means the same in software. Another benefit for software is that maintenance takes less time and is easier for those who must do it.

So now we have a guideline that can tell us when we are spending too much on heading for perfect: when the value of what you are doing is less than the value of doing something else.

I’m going to finish up with an example that a lot of people have used when making similar points. I’m sure a number of readers will roll their eyes as soon as I mention the product, but I urge you to not focus on that, but instead pick some other product or product category and make some comparisons of your own. When has the “worst” product won? How did it win? When has the “best” product won? How did it win? Which of those products started out ahead an then lost?

The product that I think I can most easily make a case for being built using “the best you can afford” mentality is: the iPhone. To see why, we have to go back to before the iPhone was announced or really speculated about. Back in the early 2000s, there were rumors of Apple working on a tablet computer. These rumors persisted ultimately until the iPad was released. It seems, based on all accounts, that these rumors were true. And again based upon what we have heard, Apple was working on what would become the iPad *before* the iPhone.

This is significant because it points out that Apple, whether you decide that means Steve Jobs, Jonny Ive, a host of other folks, or the combination of all of them, Apple was focused on making the best thing they could. At some point, who knows exactly when, someone realized that what they had—a touchscreen computer with a simplified OS—would make a great phone. At that point, the team felt that the iPad was the “best” product, but the “best they could afford” to make at the time was the iPhone.

Further, it is obvious that Apple doesn’t and never did release a version of the iPhone (or iPad) without work already being in progress on the next version. This implies that the “best we can afford” is a philosophy deeply ingrained into Apple. They are continually working on something better, but they release something that is “good enough”.

There are a number of people out there who will point out that the iPhone isn’t the number one phone any longer or that it won’t stay that way for long. I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it. For one thing, there are at most two kinds of iPhones (not counting storage size differences) available for sale at any one time. This isn’t true for any other type of phone. Also, while Apple only has a certain share of the number of devices sold, its share of the profits is much larger. That is, Apple can afford to sell fewer units because it can also manage to charge more for them. Profit is the goal of a company. Selling the most units is worthless if you don’t also have profit.

I humbly believe another example of the application of “the best you can afford” is the Improving Podcasts that I co-host with Allen Hurst. This was an idea that Allen and I had around two years ago. We wanted to create a software development podcast and have it associated with our company, Improving Enterprises. We spent several months getting some momentum built and finally realized that it was at a point where we had to release something or risk never publishing an episode. Because of that, the first episodes were more work, and the audio quality was suspect. Over time the best we could afford got better until we found, espeically due to the time involved, recording all audio over Skype was a solid balance of creating something of value without detracting from our other valuable works. This reduced the editing time significantly, allowed for remote participation, and was repeatable by either one of us. However, it also means that occaisionally we are subject to the audio difficulties and other problems associated with remote audio.

I could go on, but at this point this article is as long as I—and probably you as well—can afford. It is also the best I can afford right now. I’m sure I could fix some grammar, make some points more clearly, etc. However, I have other work to do and family to be with. I leave you with this question: How might your life and the lives of those around you improve if you stopped doing the worst you can afford and instead did the best you can afford?

Tags: agile, improving, philosophy, podcast, project management