Take the customer breakage now at 100 customers rather than at 300 - but run it through Ryan and sales before it ships
Situation
Pushing Justin Haynes and Nathan Blackham on getting three to five times the throughput out of their orgs, Peter asked where the big blocks of time are. Justin said he could do something immediately that would dramatically speed things up but would break some customers. Peter answer: do you want to break customers now when we have 100 customers, or break customers in a year when we have 300? He then attached a condition - everyone sits down, Justin explains what he wants to change and what the fallout looks like, Ryan Smith and sales both understand it, and then it goes. He pre-warned Ryan in their 1:1 that this is coming.
Reasoning
The disruption is not avoidable, only schedulable, and its cost scales with the installed base - so the cheapest moment to pay it is the earliest. Delay is not neutral here, it is compounding. The condition he attached is the other half: the thing that makes a deliberate breakage survivable is that Support and sales are not surprised by it, which converts a customer incident into a planned migration. He is buying speed with a cost he is willing to name, not pretending the cost is zero.
Additional Context
Emerged from a full day with Justin and Nathan at Peter house on 9/17 planning Linux work and org changes. Peter framed the throughput target as three to five times, explicitly rejecting slow acceleration as a route there.
Observed Evidence
Direct quote of Peter own framing in the Ryan 1:1, corroborated by his description of the same 9/17 session to Steve Wallace the same morning.
Matching Patterns
Confidence Breakdown
Reasoning Depth Analysis
Related Context
fathom
Justin is like, well, I can do something right now that is going to dramatically speed things up, but I am going to break some customers if I do it. My response to him was, okay, well, do you want to break customers now when we have 100 customers, or do you want to break customers in a year when we have 300 customers? Let us all get together. Let us understand what you want to change. Let us make sure Ryan understands what you want to change, what the fallout is going to look like for some customers. Let us make sure that sales understands. And let us go do it. And then let us go faster.
fathom
I had Nathan and Justin here for the day yesterday. What processes we can change to get five times the throughput. I am going to make some changes there.
Outcome
No outcome recorded yet.
Decision ID: f95d9932-1472-4ba7-bda3-6256ce36e99c