To Do More Do Less

To do more, do less

I’m not quite sure where this adage came from, but it’s become something I now live work by.

Let me explain.

5 years ago I joined Edozo, which is a start up focused on Commercial Property technology. I’d never worked for a start up before, but coming from Rightmove it was a fairly big shock. Suddenly gone were all of the guard rails. Code quality, deployments, infrastructure etc. were all things I needed to really focus on and align. But the biggest thing; Work Management. Gone were the well ordered Planning Sessions. The multiple teams breaking down a large task and sharing it. Gone was the deployment platform and multiple Tech Leads to bounce concepts off of.

On top of this, I was thrown into a world where the work I was doing would have a direct impact on sales conversations, and ultimately revenue. Feedback was fast. That’s not to say the work I did at Rightmove didn’t effect real users, but it was certainly more removed than what I see at Edozo.

Those working for a small start up like this will know exactly what I mean.

What’s very easy in these situations is to get your “wheels” jammed. Though, some might say “wheels spinning”. There are so many needs; from potential/new/old customers, to maintaining infra, to smaller bits like keeping Java/Node up-to-date. It’s a lot. And when all of that falls onto a single 5 person team, Work Management becomes incredibly important. Get this wrong, and you and your team can be crushed.

So relatively early on, I started to say this in meetings:

“To do more, we need to do less”.

But what does this mean? Ultimately, it means you need to look at what your team can achieve and prioritise. Once you’ve picked what you’re doing, methodically work through it. One item at a time. Avoid doing it all at the same time. Get the dopamine hit of actually finishing something. That feeling will get you through the next thing that needs doing. And the next.

I’m not saying as a team you can have only one thing in flight. It’s more about being aware of the teams capacity, and those the team relies on. If you find yourself in more meetings than actually doing work, maybe “do less”.

You may of heard the term “Stop starting, start finishing” - this links perfectly with the above.

With this in mind, I should probably share the set up of the team; we have five full time developers. We build/maintain four products, multiple backend services to power them, and a load of data + ingestion. For a team of five, with some DevOps and a product manager / owner, that’s quite a lot. If you don’t believe me, here’s our release blog showing that our “wheels” aren’t jammed.

One day I’ll share my full journey at Edozo, and how we introduced Continuous Delivery, Open Telemetry, Docker, and more.

But first, I want to finish and post this. Because to do more, do less.