Software that isn’t Written Yet can do Anything

The digital marketing and web development industries are challenging in and of themselves, but made even more difficult by the infinite quantity of acronyms, constant change and fact most users of the web aren’t engineers, search marketers or UX designers.

The industry has responded with a lot of common, sometimes humorous sayings intended to help non-technical people better comprehend a situation without having to understand the complexities or differences between CSS, CMS, CRO, CTR, JS, HTML, IDE, GUI, JSON, DOM, AWS, GIF, XML, SEO, API, ERP, MVC, FTP or SDK (ugh, too many acronyms!).

If you spend any time with the team from Integrity, you’re likely to hear a couple of these sayings:

• ‍If it’s not fun, it’s not sustainable. A foundational philosophy at Integrity is long term sustainability. Any task, workflow or project with a ton of tension isn’t a wise pursuit, so we constantly ask ourselves questions such as how we can make any task we do more enjoyable, what can we automate and what stressors can we remove from this process. It’s a daily evaluation to optimize the machine.‍
• Software that isn’t written yet can do anything. We are often asked if we can build software that does X or Y, and this is our common response. It’s not whether we can craft new software that does a thing, it’s whether that thing would be worth the time and money it’d cost to craft.‍
• You can only pick two of the following: Quality, Speed, Features. Web software development and digital marketing is a series of trade-offs between features (scope), how long it takes to produce (time/costs) and the quality of the software experience. It’s nearly impossible to sustainably max out all three of these without negatively impacting one of the three, as well as the final output.‍
• Why light our asses on fire just to see if we can put it out? Many leaders rely on brute force to accomplish their goals - providing incentives, working 20 hour days and sleeping in the office, as examples. Brute force is often reflected as an arbitrarily set due date intended as an attempt to ‘speed things up’. However, if features aren’t removed or are quality expectations lessened, setting an overly aggressive launch date only serves to frustrate everyone involved and make the process much less enjoyable, i.e. it’s totally counterproductive and often works against the program goals and objectives.‍
• 9 women can’t make a baby in a month. Inevitably in large web software development programs, the timeline slips - often significantly. A common assumption, for those less experienced, is to double the size of the dev team in order to speed things up. The truth is adding team members late in the game always slows things down, so we often use this saying to highlight how more people isn’t always the solution.‍
• Success is all the things you're not doing. Success within web development and digital marketing is as much what you decide not to focus on. Time is our only finite resource, so deep focus is critical for problem solving and innovation.

Only you can prevent fires. Many of us grew up watching Smokey the Bear on Saturday mornings warning us ‘only you can prevent forest fires’. Fires (major problems) burn just as hot in the web dev world, so we constantly evangelize individual empowerment and responsibility to proactively prevent major issues from ever even occurring.

These are just a few of the common sayings within our lexicon. We have dozens more, so contact us today if you’d like to learn more of our lessons learned within this crazy industry.

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