Fix the Weakest Point – Twitter
Wired recently blogged about Twitter. A snippet of the blog was about how dealt with its failed whale that plagued it earlier in the year.
The premise is that you find the weakest point in the system, fix it, then, move on to the next weakest point. And so on.
This made me think…Twitter’s servers are uniform…so fixing a weak point, any weak point, is critical to keeping the system/site running and not overloading other servers.
But what if the system isn’t uniform? What if one weak point isn’t as critical to the overall system as another weak point. Then focusing on the unimportant weak point is a distraction.
So let’s say that I make two products, A and B.
A has horrible margins (1%), and while its sells, and the company can’t make enough to meet the demand.
B is hot and has huge margins (60%) and demand is outpacing supply, but not as much as A.
Clearly, A is the weaker of the two as far as meeting demand, but I’d focus A. It yields considerably higher margins and making more will have a much more dramatic impact on results.
So considering utility is critical to fixing the weakest point concept.
