When American President Joe Biden recently released his ambitious $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan, it sparked a debate online about what truly counts as infrastructure. We all generally understand that roads, bridges, power, and water systems count as “real infrastructure.” But what about something like electric vehicles, broadband regulatory changes, or land use policy? What about elderly care?
Okay, not everything is infrastructure, but it doesn’t have to be infrastructure to be a worthwhile investment in our collective well-being. Ultimately, what we should care most about are the kinds of investments that generate sustainable long-term social and economic returns. They should improve our standard of living and allow people to thrive.
When I think about building technology businesses and creating software products, I get really excited about investments in our own infrastructure. Why? Because so often I’ve seen that the rate of innovation is directly affected by the quality of infrastructure supporting a technology organization. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen brilliant teams hit a snag and abandon a promising opportunity because they lacked the foundational systems they needed to innovate.
Let’s look at a few examples:
- You want to begin running a set of experiments to re-engage administrators based on the features they have yet to unlock/explore in your product
- You want to generate some awesome in-app charts to show off some key insights and metrics that will help your customer
- You want to expose a public API for one of your key services so other apps can connect to it
- You want to generate recommendations for your users that personalize their experience
- You want to open your product to users in a new country with different laws and a different primary language
Here’s the problem—unless you’re a small startup who can create scrappy shoestring solutions, the teams that are inspired to take action are often not going to be the teams that can/should stand up the foundational systems required to support these features. In the examples above, you’ll need some kind of marketing automation and notifications system, or maybe an enterprise message bus / event streaming system. Or you’ll need some front-end components and an efficient reporting database. You’ll need some kind of public API framework that provides authorization for external applications and reasonable rate limits, etc. Or you’ll need a personalization data store and a machine learning model. Or you’ll need patterns for localizing customer-entered data and translating your system fields into another culture. Who’s going to build all of that?!
If every great idea requires the driving team to make these investments from scratch, your innovation will be very sluggish. However, if you have robust infrastructure in the right places, you’ll empower teams to experiment cheaply, iterate quickly, and pursue ideas without the friction of a massive dependency in their way each time.
We too often think of innovation as this sexy pure R&D discipline that looks more like skunkworks or pure invention. This kind of unencumbered tinkering can be fun, but, in my experience, it’s often far less rewarding than innovation—using new ideas and approaches to commercialize improvements to products and services.
Innovation is about finding the frontier of a problem space and attacking it with new ideas and approaches. It’s often the creative alchemy of bringing disparate pieces together, or invoking lessons from other domains, or chipping away at a puzzle for long enough that you are able to find the essence of what matters. Your ability to concentrate your energy on innovation is often constrained by the range of things you can take for granted, the mindless background processes and systems that just work. The people who build and maintain these systems are critical to the success of your business.
In the same vein, better infrastructure in a society yields innovation. When goods and people can move quickly, efficiently, and safely; when there’s strong connectivity, and transparency of information, and efficient marketplaces; when people have the basics of life under control and their human rights protected, then people can thrive and they can innovate. They don’t need to waste their energy on re-solving solved problems and struggling through life. They can spend their creative, social, and intellectual gifts on pushing the world forward.