I’m wary of the cliche’, “doing more with less.”

When I started in my current role, my team consisted a development manager, a product manager, a business analyst, three developers, an outsource/offshore arrangement of 6-18 developers with its own full-time relationship manager and me, a non-individual contributor tech executive. We worked with a product team of three. We built our main US and six other variations over the course of 12-16 months – which was a great success in the eyes of our sponsors.

Five years later, my team consists six developers and me. I have all the same responsibilities but get to code half-time. We still work with a product team of three. When we want to flex, we co-locate two or four contract developers onsite. These contractors rotate through pairing with staff and perform as part of our team.

To characterize this as “doing more” is profoundly mistaken. If you dive into each effort, you’d see we built less and wasted less. Less production code to change and maintain, less beloved but little used features, less idiosyncratic and unnecessarily difficult implementations, less waste in the process of defining and delivering work. Our newer codebase consists of roughly half 65%* of the production code of our old site.

You accomplish more by doing less. I know this sounds very affirmational and non-specific. I’ll describe how we accomplished this in future posts…