Bad Optimizations in Business and Life

You're probably doing some optimizations that you shouldn't in both your business and your daily life.

The good news is, you can improve that.

Let’s go through some typical business optimizations I've seen other people do or done myself that were, in fact, terrible and how to turn them around.

Bad Optimizations in Software Businesses?

I’ll start with a big question.

Do bad optimizations even exist?

Yes, they do, in both business and personal life.

For example:

Say, you decided to be adventurous during lunch and now have a bad case of food poisoning. To deal with this situation you would optimize by buying toilet paper in bulk, wouldn't you? Pretty straightforward.

That is not the best optimization strategy. (Beef, bison, and bacon are the solution here, but that’s beside the point.)

In business, however, identifying a problem you are against is far less obvious than having food poisoning and buying toilet paper.

Let’s take some examples.

Example 1

Your business works in customer support through ticketing but is overwhelmed with too many tickets and little customer satisfaction. To mitigate that, you conclude that hiring more support agents is an ‘obvious’ optimization strategy.

That would be a basic bad optimization strategy.

So to take it a notch higher, the better option would be automation ie, a chatbot. You create a chatbot that will handle the initial load, and go your merry way. Problem solved, right?

Yes, but no.

I don't know about you, but in 99% of the instances I have interacted with a chatbot, it didn't quite seem to solve my problem fully. In the end, I often found myself wishing I had interacted with a human.

The best plan is simple.

Example 2

I once spent a crazy amount of time optimizing our culture document at

Example 3

Some of the businesses I have worked with optimized cost -at all costs.

While cost management is a priority for a business and without it, you could go bankrupt, excessive account optimization is detrimental.

What ends up happening is:

• The business owner soon finds themselves losing valuable employees because they don't pay them enough.




• They are forced to replace and train a new employee every few months as a result.

In short, it sets you up for the endless hamster wheel of sifting through resumes to find equally valuable employees or

Think about it like this, optimizing your employees' workflow, processes, and intelligence would probably be much easier, faster, and will get more done so that they are worth more to you and in their resumes.

This way, you empower each other and everybody wins.

It sounds trite, but it is true.

Of course, this goes both ways, with companies and employees.

I have had experiences with employees who tried to squeeze money out of me by registering a day’s or two days of work for a half-hour’s task worth of work on our project manager platform

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