Patterns / 4. Reframing the Conversation
Pattern 4.2
Speed Needs a Revenue Owner
Only argue that your work makes things faster where somebody owns the revenue that arrives sooner, and cares when it arrives.
In This Context
“It will make us faster” is one of the arguments engineers make most often, and one that lands least often. Freed-up capacity is not a saving in finance’s eyes, and faster delivery can even raise costs, because the business takes on more work. Speed only turns into money when someone is waiting for it: a budget holder whose projects are blocked, whose delivery dates are committed, and for whom every month of waiting is a cost on their side of the business.
You can see this pattern is needed when your case leads with speed, and nobody in the room owns anything that arrives sooner as a result.
- For a free shared service with fixed capacity, the wait is a cost borne by the people waiting, not by the budget holder.
- Work waiting in a queue is inventory, a cost finance already knows how to reason about.
Therefore
Find the person who bears the cost of the wait, and make the argument in their terms.
- Restate “it will make us faster” as “this revenue arrives this much sooner.”
- Name the owner of that revenue (for Jan, the business unit CIO whose projects are blocked).
- Describe the queue as inventory, and the wait as a cost on that owner’s side.
Consequently
- The speed argument lands, because it is attached to a cost that someone would pay to remove.
- The owner of the revenue becomes a natural ally.
- Where nobody owns the revenue, the speed argument has to be dropped.
Seen In
Chapter 16, “Win the Right Arguments”; Chapter 16, “Jan’s Question: ‘Why Is the Platform Team Not Delivering Fast Enough?’”; Chapter 13, sidebar “Work in Progress as Inventory”, Chapter 13, sidebar “Little’s Law”.