My goal with this book is to help you use Liquid along with four basic building blocks to help your companies’ teams work better together, fulfill customer’s requests more efficiently, be more flexible to customer’s needs, and ultimately make your business more money.
Impact Vs Effort
In my last job as an engineering team lead, one of the things we constantly stressed to our team was the difference between impact and effort (Being busy versus being productive). It is possible to put in a lot of effort and have very little impact. Inversely, the opposite is also possible. You can put in very little effort and have a huge impact.
There are tons of examples of the difference you see all the time if you learn to spot the difference and pay attention. Here are few:
- High Effort, Low Impact: The “Juicero” Silicon valley startup raised $120M to create a $400 juicing machine. The company was ridiculed when users found out you could squeeze the juice out of the packet without ever needing the machine at all.
- High Effort, Low Impact: The Movie “John Carter” had a production cost of $263M, but lost $122M. There are lots of examples of “movie flops” you can find by Googling.
- Low Effort, High Impact: The game “Flappy Bird” was created by a single developer in 2-3 days. At the height of success, the game was making $50K per day.
- Low Effort, High Impact: The movie “Paranormal Activity” was created on a budget of $15k, and went on to make $193M worldwide. Blumhouse Studio has had several low cost movies with this type of success.
Is your team working with low effort and high impact?
Get the Highest Impact From Your Team
Your team should be focused on building features that have the lowest cost to the company and the highest levels of return possible. That’s the beauty of software. A one time up-front investment can pay off for years when things are built correctly.
I would urge your team to explore the four building blocks discussed in this book, and look at how Liquid can help in other areas of your business as well. Incredible profits are possible when your engineering team is working with this mindset.