Traditional Development vs. Getting Real.
Sometimes you have to compromise.
At kopilot, we believe in value through automation. One of our primary goals is to give our users back their time.
Why allowing manual input while your moto is value trough automation?
And we compromised it. Temporarily.
A few days ago, we released our planning and tracking expenses engine. It consists of making our users aware of all the cash their company burned, and aware of all the money they are going to burn.
So far, the engine is manual. It means that users are required to input by hand all their expenses. Here lies the compromise.
Why allowing manual input while your moto is value trough automation, you might ask. Two reasons:
1- Getting Real to deliver actual value the soonest
For too long, we were spending time building the behind-the-scenes, before showing something concrete to our users. For instance, we’ve created the connector with Harvest before letting people monitoring their sales.
Here is an endless debate you might face at some points in time. I regularly meet this hard discussion with some clients from our consulting services as well.
The whole debated opposites:
Option A — building a top-notch automated system before creating actual and perceptible value for your users
Option B — delivering immediate potential value to your end-users before automating the back end.
Since we opted for our product-led model, we decided to go all-in with delivering perceptive, and tangible value the soonest.
✔️Our users do not have to wait for our development velocity to benefit from some features.
Yes, it comes with a cost: manual tasks in kopilot.👎
And we’re apologizing for this.
Although, we will never apologize for trying to get our users back on control to make them go out of the mist the sooner.
👉 More info on Getting Real: https://basecamp.com/books/getting-real
2- More ideas, more robust
By delivering something usable, some users start experimenting with the features. They begin to consume value.
Too often, we only think of the happy path, the ideal way. The way it should work. But life often decides otherwise. How many times have you designed a process thinking that users should perform the tasks in a specific manner… and when the times come, it goes completely different?
✔️ By delivering actual screens, and features for real, we discover the ignored patterns immediately.
✔️ We generate new ideas sooner as we react to users’ feedback, or simply because we found that it would be great that…
✔️ When times come for automation, the contract is more transparent for the automation team as they know precisely what our users are expecting from them. They know to what value they are going to contribute.
👎 It is not the perfect solution.
The undreamt-of benefits of manual tasking
No big revelation here: manual input is annoying.
But we discovered some benefits to it. In any case, as far as expenses are concerned.
Have you ever heard about the kakeibo?
Kakeibo is a way of manually tracking your finances to help you stick to a budget and reach your savings goals. According to The Journal of Japanese Studies, the concept of kakeibo is credited to Hani Makoto, the first female journalist in Japan, who published one of the first magazines targeted at a housewife audience, “Fujin No Tomo,” in 1908.
Makoto encouraged her readers to develop schedules and systems for household tasks. We applied it to corporations. (disclaimer: if you have hundreds of payables invoices a month, it might become tricky. But we are working on it!)
By taking a close look at what you’re doing with your money and asking yourself in-depth, reflective questions, you can change your financial habits and reach your goals.
If you want to set and reach any sort of financial goal, you need to know what’s going on with your money. You can’t just get your paychecks each month, spend away, and hope for the best.
Sitting down and taking a close look at your finances at the start of each month, then taking the time to write down everything that’s coming in and going out, might seem like a drag, but it’s a must if you want to tame the money beast once and for all.
By merely performing this (long and fastidious) exercise, we shaved off our cost by 37%. Well… it seemed that we had a good return on our invested time!
In sum
You do not have to wait for the end of all the development to create value for your users.
Instead of focusing on creating documentation, wireframe, mockups, you might spend that time creating actual screens, delivering features for real.
You create an almost win-win situation: users get something to fulfill their need, you may test your solution with real usage patterns.
It comes with a disadvantage: it is not the ideal solution, and some people might not want to try it.
In our case, manual input helps us to set the frame. Setting the structure generated new ideas. Those new ideas worth maybe more than having firstly automated the data acquisition. It frames the development effort on automation as the team knows what the contract is.
Make no mistake; automation is a must, we agree. We erected “value through automation” as a moto. And even more, because our users do believe it as well.
Long is the road.
Thank you for reading!
Forecast your sales,
Plan your expenses
to pilot your company with kopilot.
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