High-hanging fruits

Low, far or high ? Pick the right task to rock your workflow.

Disclaimer: despite its fruity title, this article does not mention apples or oranges. It does however mention guys like Descartes and Edgar Morin. So keep on reading.

Low

I’m sure you’ve heard it : “pick the low-hanging fruit first”.

If you’re not familiar with that expression, it’s a simple metaphor for doing the easiest and simplest tasks first, with the objective of producing tangible results fast.

In sales, it’s the client you can sign with one phone call. Maybe not the biggest sale, but easily attainable compared to a long business competition that will need tons of ressources to produce.

In development, it’s the quick fix, clean and neat but with no code-refactoring, that will improve the performance of a system.

In project management, it’s about identifying the best path in a large project. It’s the first baby-steps that make the whole thing easier.

In marketing, it’s the new active users you get by simply emailing “sleeping”’ accounts versus the whole nine yards of a complex growth strategy.

It’s a huge part of our DNA and mindset at CosaVostra. It’s about being efficient, pragmatic, result-oriented and cost-effective.

Far

Quite often, you tend to go for the far-hanging fruit. Why ? Because it’s not always easy to either accept to pick the low-hanging fruit, or identify them.

Not easy to accept because it’s less intellectually rewarding than a more complex solution that will produce the same results but with more initial resources, conception, work.

Not easy to identify because, well — we’re only humans and don’t know it all. The difficulty that we sometimes see with clients is that they have pre-conceived ideas about certain methods, techniques or platforms. In e-commerce for instance, it’s using Magento 2 or Commerce Cloud to sell a few thousands products a year to a few thousand customers. Obviously, there are much simpler and cost-effective solutions that will produce identical results (WooCommerce, Shopify, etc). See this post (in French) I wrote about the Playmobil — Lego Dilemma.

High

But sometimes, you gotta go all in and pick the high-hanging fruit.

Let’s get philosophical on this. For Descartes, any complex issue can be analyzed, understood (and solved) if you look at it as a series of smaller pieces — it’s called reductionism. Ok, it’s far fetched, but here it is : the low-handing fruit are easily attainable objectives of a wider, greater goal.

On the other hand, Edgar Morin advocates the acceptance of complexity. You can read about it here. Ultra simplified, his idea is that the whole has more value than the sum of its elements, organized and assembled. A mentos is one thing, CocaCola is another, independently they have their use, together they produce incredible results :)

Choosing to pick the high-hanging fruit is a long battle, not always efficient in its first stages, with potentially a complex approach and costly execution. It’s the anti-MVP. It’s the bigger picture. It’s what machine learning brings to data analytics.

Why would you pick that fruit ?

Mix your long term objective, your available time and your available ressources: if your expected result and value creation is exponentially superior, do it.

And ping me if you need help for the mix: we love cocktails at CosaVostra!