Efficiency’s Role

“Surely, now is the time to focus on efficiency.”
“Everyone is hurrying to take advantage of the new tools. I must catch up.”
“Since I’ve been getting more efficient, I’m making progress.”

Efficiency feels like progress. You work on reducing your costs, increasing your speed, making more with less.

If you want to make progress, there’s no way around it, you must get to a point of efficiency. A minimum amount of it.

Your customer? They’ll want to get to a minimum amount of efficiency too.

But efficiency feels like progress, until it doesn’t.

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They say that anything that can be done efficiently might not need to be done at all.

They say that efficiency should be coupled with effectiveness. Doing things quickly is not the same as doing the right things.

They say that the problem with a race to the bottom (on price, cost, or time) is that you might come in second.

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Efficiency is only half of the progress. You can only maximize efficiency up to a point. Yes, a fast response on customer service is impressive. Yes, a UI that is quick is better. Yes, hurrying to deliver value to your customer, that’s a good cause.

What you want to maximize, instead of efficiency, is whether you serve.

Do you serve well the job for which your customer hired your product?
Do you help your buyer make progress?
Do you serve their journey away from a “from”, and toward a “to”.
Do you delight?
Do you provoke progress?

It’s easy to focus on measurable metrics, like the ones you track when you’re getting efficient. But it’s only part of the mix of what to work on, and the rest of the mix is harder to measure.

Efficiency is only half of the progress. The other half is the meaningful part, the hard part. The part you’ll want to make progress on, quick!