Bridging Tech and Business Metrics

How to work backwards to tie technology value to outcomes

In Maine, a place in the far northeast regions of the United States, people are often heard saying the following when giving directions:

“You can’t get there from here”

If you spend time in Maine, getting from point A to point B can be daunting. GPS has helped in today’s world. If you have ever traveled through remote regions of the world however, you know that the roads are not always as straightforward as shown on the app.

The same thing can be said for software development. What looked like an obvious right path at first, ends up going down the wrong way. Most of us push on, trapped by our own delusion of being right. If you are fortunate though, you pull away from the vortex of the sunk cost fallacy and make the painful decision to backtrack to the beginning.

In my active programming days, I often found myself backtracking. Whether a mistake in the data model, using the wrong library, or writing 200 lines of code when 20 could suffice, I would go down the rabbit hole only to realize many hours later I made a dumb choice.

The frustrating part of backtracking is recovering from mistakes. If you took the advice of the fine people of Maine however, instead of focusing on the “here”, it is better to think about the “there”. In other words, you start from end and work your way to the beginning.