Why choose simplicity?

It's interesting that lots of people favor complexity. Some hold onto the notion that complexity is strong and simplicity is weak. In reality, the opposite is true.

To start with, lets look at your service level agreement. Each and every service in your system creates another point of failure. When determining overall system reliability, using agreed-upon mathematics, you will quickly see that more services ususally equates to lower system reliabilty for the products and services that you deliver. Simpler designs are inherently more fault tolerant because there are less points of failure.

Simpler systems are easier to maintain. There are less services to monitor, less locations for code to sit and hide, less places to add security patches and push new code to, and less services for the dev team to learn and stay up to date on. In a complex system, not only can the initial time to market increase, new features can take longer to develop and release. Over time, complex systems tend to take longer and longer to add features to, creating a downward trend in sprint velocity.

Let's look at this from a customer perspective. Which scenario do you think will result in a higher acquistion of news customers, one with a complex onbarding process or one with a simple onboarding process? Especially in situations where a customer would like to demo your service, if it's something they can adopt in minutes you are far more likeley to pull them along than if it takes hours or weeks.

We have seen first-hand that complexity finds it way into systems, orgs, and mindsets. We have a track record of converting not only systems but also mindsets. We have led transformation of products and teams through this process. As a result, organizations find that there are less service outages, teams can allocate more resources to new feature develpoment, customer onboarding is quicker and easier, customer aquisition becomes easier, and cutomers often increase the priority of adopting your product. Costs go down and revenue goes up.