Can you guess from the code snippet above what the output would be?
Well, if you have any iota of programming knowledge, you might have guessed that this code prints 12345.
All the software in the world is built with codes. The number of lines of code would range from a few hundred to millions, or even more.
Fascinated by the advancement of technology in the world, Bob starts to learn programming and coding. He goes from writing a few lines of code to hundreds in a day.
After a few years of working, Bob gets an excellent startup idea and begins working on it. Along with development, he starts doing marketing as well.
Fast forward Six months later, the product grows with multiple features, but sales and marketing are stagnant. Slowly, Bob gets frustrated and wonders if the project should be dropped. He starts to wonder why he cannot do well in marketing and sales.
Bob is a problem solver; he finds out why it’s overwhelming for him to do marketing and sales compared to coding.
The reason is “lack of tracking of progress.”
When he writes code and runs it, there are only two possible outcomes: either the code runs successfully or it doesn’t (obvious, right)?
However, in any case, Bob knows the result immediately. If the outcome is success, it’s awesome. But if the outcome is failure, Bob can work further on fixing the code. This process continues until the outcome is success.
This process goes on for many years. In some cases, Bob knows what the outcome will be without even running the codes.
But, in marketing, it was tough to quickly know if the marketing strategy was working. Even worse, by the time he knew the strategy was not working, it had already cost substantial time and money. The cluelessness is daunting.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if Bob could see the output of their marketing progress, similar to how one can see or guess the output of the code snippet above? The only logical solution to this would be to break the progress into short, time-framed milestones. If the progress is on track, that’s great. If progress is far away from the milestones; pivot.