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Commitment Willingness

Do Hard Things

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEiCNDHnpsU.

I once led a small, incredibly talented innovation team at a healthcare informatics business. We were a company of many firsts. Notably, we were arguably the first company in the United States to use the pubic cloud to host healthcare data, using many thoughtful and proprietary security techniques.

Our software stack was innovative, featuring many capabilities focused on ease of use and speed of operation. We had a relentless focus on security and user experience, which are not easy things to balance.

Like many agile organizations, our team sat together in a collaborative environment, and I enjoyed my first-row seat watching their daily interactions. One day, during negotiations in a sprint planning session, a thoughtful systems engineer described an upcoming feature to our software engineers that would bring significant value to our software’s audience.

“That’s hard,” said one of the software engineers.

What happened next was one of the most memorable and perfect utterances of a single word that I have ever witnessed in my entire life.

“So?” said the systems engineer.

Can you think of a better response than that?


(For those who are curious…of course they did it.)

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