The “Stairstep Method”

“What have you done for me lately?”
“What have you done for me lately?”

Living in the real world as a financial professional requires one to constantly deliver value.  Related to this is one of my favorite concepts: the “stairstep method.”  My mentor introduced me to the stairstep method during my formative working years.  We worked on financial risk analysis software for a startup energy trading firm.  We needed to maintain a grip on the risks we faced in the energy markets every day, since our firm had a fairly exotic portfolio and we were running headlong into the California energy crisis.  Yet the portfolio required a lot of custom analysis tools that were time-consuming to develop, and the end product was always needed pronto.  The solution was to roll out many small, frequent changes that were immediately useful, and demo the software changes to our colleagues and internal users as soon as possible.

Below is a rough outline of my mentor’s explanation of the stairstep method.

  1. Think in terms of developing your overall infrastructure,
  2. But only work on problems in desperate need of a solution.
  3. Quickly develop a small product/feature that partly addresses the problem.
  4. Test your solution until it works.
  5. Demo to end-users.  Show that it produces a needed result.
  6. Gather feedback and loop back to step 2 until you take off the rough edges.
  7. Generalize the solution where possible.
  8. Use the lessons (and tools you built) to loop back to step 1 to attack the next problem.

Yes, this is taken from the software world.  Yes, it seems like common sense.  However, my mentor’s message was less about the nitty gritty of software development, and more about managing the politics and optics of developing anything from an end-user perspective.  Very few people care about how something is made.  However, everyone cares about having a product or solution that addresses their problem.  When people know their problem is being worked on, they inevitably become impatient while they wait for the solution to arrive.

Rather than letting executives / influencers / investors / end-users / clients wait for one big delivery of work product, your goal is to deliver a much smaller chunk as soon as it is available.  This buys you (a little) more time and/or capital. Use the feedback to inform the next development stage, and use the existing tools and process to form the foundation for the next project.  The iterations are days apart or a week at most.

If you are from the software industry, I’m sure you live for this stuff and can point to “agile development” or another framework that encapsulates the concept.  If you are not from the software industry, you might have to look up “agile development” as I just did on Google.  In either case, I am willing to bet you understood 80% of “stairstep method” the moment you heard the words.

There is a great post by Rob Walling, who puts the concept in a marketing context.  I had never heard of Rob until I listened to his great conversation with Michael Covel on the Trendfollowing podcast, and Rob’s name turned up again when I did a google search for “Stairstep Method” as I wrote this post.  (Tangential note: Trendfollowing is an awesome podcast, I highly recommend it.  No affiliation to either Walling or Covel.)  I particularly liked this point from Rob’s post:

The tech media likes to focus on moonshots because they’re exciting, but their focus on the 1-in-10,000 that work means they ignore the hoards of people who have tried and failed because they try to play in the NFL before they’ve learned basic blocking and tackling.

Breaking Away

If you work on any large, complex, long-range project that will result in a massive improvement, you may already understand that you are not working on a large, complex, long-range project.  You are working on a long series of tiny projects.  Your performance will improve if everyone else understands this as well.