Lowering the bar

Blue Apron has been a game-changer in my household. It lowered the bar for me to learn how to cook by cutting out shopping and finding recipes, and limiting the cook time. The lower bar enabled me to focus on just the prep work and cooking, so now I’m cooking! The feedback loop here is obvious—cook food, eat food, yum, repeat.

This is a general principle that applies everywhere. Remove friction and tighten feedback loops. Then iterate and expand. For example, at my job. If we want to have better quality through more testing, we start small. Set up a testing framework and create examples that enable the team to easily get started. They can copy the existing examples and modify for their features. Create a feedback loop that automates the testing and makes the results visible. Once you establish that, you can start adding more sophisticated tests and increase coverage.

Thursday, April 6, 2017