Last week, I linked to this amazing piece from Jason Lengstorf that discusses how creating great content is a process not a project. It's a relevant piece, yet very few of you clicked on it. Which is why I'm putting it up top in this piece and going to expand on it. The reason I think it's so relevant is that even though Jason argues that great content is an iterative process. I'm going to argue that most of what we do—content or not—is in fact iterative and no-code lets us do those iterations faster.
If we look at what we all do, marketing managers, CEO, finance managers, whatever, we actually all do similar things over and over again. A customer success manager's job can be broken down into discrete interactions client onboarding processes. Every client is in some way unique but there's enough commonality between them that learnings from one client can be at least partially applied to the next. Applying Jason's lens, on your first client call in a specific industry, you have no mental bandwidth to think about anything except how your solution can benefit them. After 10 calls with clients in their industry, you start with a pretty good idea of how they should use it so you can focus on other things like where your interlocutor fits in the company hierarchy etc. etc.
The piece got me thinking about a question my manager often asks: how can we make this 10% better?
It's a great question because it's answer is something you can often do quickly without feeling intimidated. The answer doesn't require coordination or approval. It's something you can just...do! Over time those incremental changes make a huge difference.
Just to understand what the impact of 10% over a sufficient period of time looks like, take a moment to guess what the return is on investing 1$ at 10% over 50 weeks (or years)? You end up with $117! I bet that's much more than you expected. Our brains just aren't built for compounding/exponential returns!
It's a question I ask myself every week after my stream and newsletter. Every week, I write down 2-3 aspects that I think can be improved. Over time that creates a backlog of incremental changes that can be tackled in the time I dedicate to Automate All the Things. The last few weeks have been small but important changes to the stream layout. Before that, it was creating a workflow for faster timestamps so folks who couldn't join live had a good experience (thanks Colleen).
What is the tie in with no-code here? What I think enables me—and a lot of you—to feel like a 10% improvement is possible is the fact that we're operating in a low-code environments. Most of the improvements represent incremental tweaks we can implement ourselves or at least that we all can understand! The accessibility (and power) of no-code is what lets me know that there will often be a 10% improvement with moderate effort.
To wrap up this slightly meandering piece, I encourage you to look at your work iteratively (process, not a project) and ask yourself every week or every couple of weeks, how can you make that process 10% better? And, hopefully, you're working on a team and in an environment where anyone can tackle that 10%.
Until next week and keep building!
Aron
