Simplify Everything

There’s a lot of abstract advice about employing simplicity when building great products or writing great code.  However, life and products (particularly in the Enterprise software market, where I’ve spent most of my career) are complicated.  It’s often hard to gleen concrete examples of what these maxims are trying to communicate.

The other day I was in a pub waiting for a lunch meeting to start and I got to witness the week’s beer delivery.  This is a fairly hard problem to solve efficiently if you’re in a city where parking is difficult (or nonexistent), buildings were constructed hundreds of years before accessibility laws (meaning stairs and tight doorways), kegs are very heavy (over 200 pounds when full), and where a lot of beer is consumed requiring frequent deliveries.

If you or I were designing a solution to this problem, we might come up with this solution:

• 1 truck
• 2 employees (1 driver, 1 loader/unloader)
• 1 automatic lift at the rear or on the side of the truck
• 1 appliance dolly that can move up or down stairs

We’d be pretty happy with that.  Not the worst solution in the world.  It’s possible we could reduce to one employee but the automatic lift will take enough time setting up and lifting that we’ll probably exceed our very short “stop with flashers on” window.  We’d therefore need to park and have someone stay with the truck, or make several “fly byes” to stay within the unloading time limit.  This will really limit how many delivers we could make in a day, possibly requiring a lot of delivery crews.

Here’s how they actually do it:

• 1 truck
• 1 driver / unloader
• 1 airbag

The driver pulls up, parks the truck right outside the entrance of the pub with the flashers on, whips out his airbag from the passenger seat, rolls up the side of the truck, pulls off the keg and lets it fall right on the airbag.  He then rolls it into the pub (for those with cellar keg storage, they have their own airbag) and after about 20 kegs and less than 5 minutes, he’s out of there.

A lot less cost, a lot faster, and no expensive equipment.  

Simple.