Importance of Scale

I am an avid fan of The Great British Bake Off (known in the US as The Great British Baking Show): I’ve binge-watched all the available seasons, bought the books, and even attempted some of the recipes myself. It’s been an endless source of inspiration for many of my presentations. Baking and development have surprisingly much in common, but that’s a story for another day.

One of the challenges the contestants on the show face is producing a number of pastries that are exactly the same. The significance of this task is that consistency and scale are precisely what separate casual home baking from artisanal or professional quality. When baking for family and friends, no one is going to complain if every pastry looks different - as long as it’s delicious. But producing consistent results at scale requires a whole different level of skill and experience.

When I presented about SAP at my kid’s high school, I ended with the message that if the students took only one thing away from the presentation, it should be this: scale is very important.

It’s not difficult to make one pretty pastry, one simple app, or build an interface to be used once a day. Doing those things at a much larger scale is an entirely different matter (there is a cool newsletter about it). When people talk about IT and ERP, I feel this fact is often overlooked.

“We’ll just build our own AI/ERP/<insert product name> with blackjack and hookers!” - well, good luck with that. You might build it, but will it scale? That can be a many-million-dollar question. JP