Is your tech moving your business forward?

Tech has a bad habit of being treated like a silver bullet that will instantaneously plop a successful business into your hands.

Technology can do a lot of things, but it will never do that.

Of all the things technology can do, it primarily does one thing really well.

That one thing is speed. Technology makes things go faster - things like annoying calculations, onboarding users, capturing revenue, sending messages, and the like.

When you reduce technology down to its component parts - it is merely speeding up human processes. So it can make that business process you designed go a lot faster and further than you could take it manually.

How tech helps businesses scale

It’s no secret that manual processes are slow, prone to error, and create bottlenecks in your organization.

SaaS products (aka custom tech other companies built and sold to you) have revolutionized the way businesses operate by streamlining processes and speeding up the pace of operations. Custom technology can similarly significantly speed up business processes and increase efficiency, resulting in improved productivity, reduced costs, and ultimately, increased profits.

The particular bottlenecks each business faces may be different, but using technology to unblock them is how you scale - and get that 10x return for investors.

But what if you find your tech slowing you down instead of speeding you up?

In spite of its limitless capacity for helping businesses scale, misaligned technology can have a negative impact on business growth.

If your tech isn’t closely aligned with business priorities, technology can quickly become one of the heaviest weights slowing you down (primarily due to how much time and money it costs to develop).

Misalignment between technology and business priorities can lead to a range of risks, including failure to achieve business objectives, inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and poor customer experiences.

When your tech isn’t well aligned with your business, you’ll see these early warning signs:

⚠️ Your road mapping meetings are hijacked by conversations about technical debt and deployment delays

⚠️ You miss a standup and everyone works on things you never would have approved

⚠️ Your tech team knows nothing about the details of how you spend the majority of your time

⚠️ Your roadmap has bells and whistles up next when the critical path is still buggy

We hear about these warning signs from clients all the time, and it’s a hard place to navigate. We’re all used to using apps that have billions of dollars behind them, and every feature under the sun is possible for those companies (think: Slack, Uber, DoorDash). But the problem comes when you want that too, but you’re just not there yet.

You can’t have every feature under the sun. Limited resources necessitate a limited focus.

So how can you ensure tech helps you scale up and not slow you down?

Before the tech giants of our day were giants, they disrupted the market by doing a single thing better than the reigning giants in their industry. What is the one thing you’re doing better than anyone else?

Below are two questions we ask our clients to answer honestly about their apps to diagnose where their tech is failing to support business growth.

(1) Do you do one thing excellently?

You’re doing a lot, but do you do one thing best in class? Will people tell their friends about your service in a coffee shop? Would someone pay you to do this for them manually?

For example, if you’re building an app that automatically matches roommates, have you made a successful roommate introduction offline? Do all of your friends say “Yeah, Sarah is the best at reading people. I met my best friend through one of her introductions!”?

Your app helps your secret sauce reach millions, not dozens, but it can’t create your secret sauce for you.

🤐 Here’s a secret no one is talking about. AI, ML, NLPs - they all need training on what, how, why and when, too. Your AI isn’t magic 🪄 . It’s as smart as you teach it to be. Take what makes you excellent, and scale it using these amazing tools. Don’t rely on them to make you excellent.

(2) Do you know the link between your tech investment and business outcomes?

Anything you invest in tech should be tightly linked to an expected positive ROI for your business. How would you answer the questions below?

Do you know your expected ROI on your tech investment?

What upside are you expecting from the tech you are building right now? If you doubled your investment in your tech, do you know how that would impact the things you care about (revenue, customer acquisition, vertical integration)? Every dollar invested in your tech should have a corresponding positive impact on your business outcomes.

What are your first customers buying?

Yes, your journey ends with a feature-rich app that you sell to Zuck so you can get Mark Cuban his 10x return on his investment in you, but before then - what will your first customers buy? How can you make your vision attractive right now, before you’ve sunk two years of development cost into a product?

What are you proving or testing with this next release?

If you didn’t release that bug fix, what would happen? It’s not the bug that’s frustrating you — it’s the customer churn that could result. Focus your conversations on that churn, not on the feature, so you can accurately measure your tech investment.

📈 Success looks like publicly committing to OKRs, 3-5 KPIs, or another framework you love. Your investment in tech should tie to a corresponding return on one of these outcomes.

Using tech to move your business forward

Technology has enormous potential to scale your business - improving productivity, reducing costs, and increasing profits. It also has enormous potential to prove fatal if out of alignment with your business objectives - resulting in inefficiencies, missed opportunities, wasted money, poor customer experiences.

So what about you? Has tech been moving your business forward in exciting ways, or are you at risk of it becoming a stumbling block or distraction from greater business progress? One of the ways we ensure tech is a force multiplier for our clients is through our Critical Path ROI Template. Get yours below.