Of the importance of execution to become a great technologist

Strategy and Vision always get the limelight. Most junior technologists are always thinking about great ideas to solve challenging business problems. At the opposite, execution is seen as… well, just execution :-) Nobody likes to think themselves as an execution engine !

Innovation is extremely important. The mistake is to think that innovation is decoupled from execution.

They go hand-to-hand, you cannot have one without the other.

In many cases, an apparently innovative idea does not account for all the real-world constraints. You may wonder at first why people are doing it this way or that way, but then when you dig into the details you realize how hard the problem is. It’s really unfortunate to fall into that pitfall: people who really know their stuff will hear you all day speaking non-sense. You will be perceived as somebody superficial. And once you finally understand what it’s about – well, that’s often too late: your bad reputation has been built already ! Being involved in daily execution is the way to understand things deeply. You have more context to judge by yourself is your solution is right and how to fix it. Things go faster.

You may realize also that you are not solving the right problem. That's the story of the guy frustrated about something and nobody want to listen to him. Again, being involved in execution will give you a sense of what the pain points are not only for you but for the organization as a whole. A great technologist knows how to shift his focus and not stick.

If you are an architect, go back to the keyboard every once in a while to understand the pain that programmers are going through. If you work on infrastructure, always be your own consumer. Think about testing, monitoring, recovery – all their things maybe not very sexy but nonetheless necessary. The Devil, and the really interesting stuff that will challenge your mind, is often in the details. Try to value all aspects of a problem and not only where your comfort zone is.

The second thing is that innovation means risk. If you truly believe in something, you need to take responsibility and drive it to completion. If you don’t master the execution side, it’s much more likely that your innovated idea will stay on the “PowerPoint platform” and not make it into real code ! People will listen to your new ideas and will say it’s great, but making them take the risk for you is very very hard.

Further: do you really want to take the risk that somebody else spoils your great idea ? It may not get a second chance after that.

Managers value passion, because it is stronger than any degree, methodology or automation tool. It’s why, two ideas being equal, it’s likely that the one whom the supporter can also execute will be elected. If you look back, I am sure you will find examples where you had a great idea, people seem enthusiastic about it but ultimately it lead to nowhere. Now, try to think of what would have happened if you could execute on it. It’s how start-ups get their funding: VC look at the business plan, but the entrepreneur is often even more important.

In some cases, you may be lucky and find people to execute for you. Again, look back and ask yourself how well did it go ? Did you ever blame people for not implementing correctly your vision? Or implementing the wrong thing ? If you are closely involved in execution, you can address both problems. On one side, you’ll spend more time with people and have opportunities to mentor them; the more disruptive your idea is, the more you need to socialize it. As you learn about the difficulties found during implementation, you may find interesting things your overlooked in the first place and improve the vision. New ideas are often a prototype, like a gem in the rough.

There is a common pattern among junior technologists. Their heart is in innovation, and are too negligent about execution. They are thus not very reliable, and slowly put on the sideline. Not that people want to be mean with them, but it’s just the path of least resistance: managers will choose the person they think they can rely on the most, having the right projects those persons get better over time. Then get chosen for more and more complex and challenging projects and end-up making the strategic choices. An innovative guy, without the execution skills, is automatically sidelining himself.

How to break that cycle? Simple: you need to build you way up. Start by basic stuff, take a concrete problem and show that you can solve it well. Learn from that, build trust, and tackle more and more challenging things. As much as your involvement in execution is important, you need also to manage it. Too many teams are burnt-out by execution, and not enough planning. Not enough planning, means more firefighting... and no time for planning !

Get ahead of the curve. The Great Innovator knows how to keep a fine balance between digging into the details from time to time, and leave time for thinking and rallying people to his vision.