Scott Porad

A lesson about business that Seth Godin learned by riding a bicycle: your best opportunity to improve your cycling performance is while riding uphill.  In other words, your speed has limits when you’re riding downhill, so extra effort doesn’t make that much of a difference.  But, when riding uphill your extra effort really counts.

Let me show you how this lesson applies to web development.  To do so, let’s ride our bicycle up and down the Hill of Traffic.  What you see below is a chart representing traffic on a web site over a period of time.  On side A, you see that traffic is going up, and on side B it is going down.

When your website or company is on Side A, then it’s Good Times.  Traffic is growing and everybody his happy.  On the other hand, Side B is Bad Times.  Traffic is falling and everybody is worried.

During the Good Times, there isn’t a lot of consequence when you slip a schedule, or ship a bug.  No worries…it’s Good Times, right?  But, during the Bad Times, the boss wants you to rush stuff out the door faster stop the falling trend, and is willing to take calculated risks on quality.  Big worries because if this doesn’t turn the tide…well, it’s Bad Times.

The lesson is that when you’re going up the Hill of Traffic, Side A, that’s when you’re extra effort counts.  During the Good Times, that’s when you have the opportunity to focus the things that make a development team great–test automation, solid operations and infrastructure, and planning, design, estimation, scheduling and delivery.

When you’re going down the Hill of Traffic, Side B–and inevitably you will, for a week, or a month, or a quarter–you won’t have time to focus on the things that make a team great.  All you will be able to do is run like mad and hope that you’re best efforts turn things around.

To me, this is relevant because Cheezburger is Good Times right now, and everybody is having fun.  But, that isn’t going to last forever, so now is the time that we’re going to re-double our efforts at being an awesome team.