Build The Right Thing > Build The Thing Right

Engineers and technical professionals are full of opinions on how to build technology.

• Microservices.

• Idempotent pipelines.

• Metadata-driven data ingestion.

• Bar charts instead of pie charts.

• Surrogate keys over business keys.

• Data Vault warehouse modeling.

• Trunk based development.

There is no end to this list.

The conversations on LinkedIn and at the local tech meetup swirl around debating how to build it right.

But most of you don't care about that.

You are aware of these conversations, but they aren't what keeps you up at night. You are stuck thinking about a harder and more important question.

How do we build the right thing?

Building the thing right is a vanity project if you haven't first established that you are building the right thing.

• How do we build something that will best help our stakeholders?

• How do we decide between the competing needs of the business?

• Which of these data products ideas will grow stale and unused and which will empower the marketing team for the next fiscal year?

You can figure out microservices, data modeling techniques, or visualization choices later.

It's the leader's task to first pick the right thing to build.

You aren't alone.

I’m here,

Sawyer