preface

Have you ever been confused about your current job?

“I’ve been doing business, and I don’t know how to value myself.”

“Leader always asks me to find value, discover value and create value, but I don’t know how to start.”

“I know this repetitive work isn’t worth much to me right now, but there’s nothing else I can do.”

“Envy those who do the architecture, who do the bottom, what they do is valuable.”

“…”

So, what is value, what is valuable and what is not, or is value just something that needs to be measured?

The body of the

Immeasurable, broad value

Many people may fall into a misunderstanding of the word value, believing that there is value or not in things themselves. However, in my opinion, anything, anything that exists, is valuable. If there is no value, it may be nihilistic and non-existent.

For example, we dream, all sorts of illusory dreams that don’t really exist, that don’t map to the real world. Things in dreams are worthless but the totems of human belief such as God and Buddha are nothingness, but they have a real reflection in the real world, so they are valuable.

Therefore, my understanding of value is not emotional, because it is valuable if it exists. We usually say that something is worthless because it is subjective and judgmental, and cannot really measure the value of something.

It can be said that the value here is in a broad sense, while in real life, or in work, we talk about value in a narrow sense, with context. This kind of value is measurable, and corresponding measure standard and measure method

Measurable, narrow sense of value

Special value often has its own context, such as the value of you in this company, the value of you as an employee, the value of you in this industry, the value of you in this team, and so on, if we only focus on the context will fall into the predicament of the a value measure, the dilemma as I mentioned in the preface, the context of the current value so much, If you focus only on your environment, your value will be limited by that environment

For example, those engaged in business research and development, because the value of business is often measured by the professional level of business knowledge, and based on the judgment generated by such professional knowledge and the result of judgment execution, as the end of the whole business value creation chain, research and development is naturally not more valuable than product operation market.

This kind of value measurement dilemma limited by the environment is also the spiritual dilemma of most business research and development at present. As a result, it is difficult to improve business, so we have to build the structure and make gay construction.

Or go to the other extreme, advocate R & D to run in front of the product, run to the demand side, to do more than the product, than the operation of the user, more professional (I think, R & D than the product, than the operation of professional, then why product operation? It is clear that the very few cases (those who are promoted by knowing the business and the expertise of the business) take a lot of R&D to the other extreme.

Obviously, these two extreme approaches are not the best or even the right way for us as engineers and software developers to break through the dilemma of value measurement. So what is the right way?

Correctly understand the value, see the light of the right way

As mentioned above, the reason why you fall into the dilemma of value measurement is because you have framed yourself in the context of value. What is the context of value? The context of value is the generalization of a chain of value creation.

For example, your value in the business. In the business context, you are at the end of the business value creation chain. You only participate in but do not lead the creation of value.

And your value in architecture, in common technology, in middleware, in this context, is often technical value, technology is context, as a developer, as a technician you are the creator and definer of value, assuming that there are products and operations in this kind of team, that must be an irrelevant role. Just the opposite.

Therefore, the key to breaking through the dilemma of value measurement is context. Do not let yourself become the participant or the end of value creation in a specific context. If you can’t change the context, try to define it yourself. In fact, the process of defining value and creating context is repeatedly mentioned in many big factories. As a technician, we should understand business, discover value, and learn how to drive business with technology, and so on.

In fact, it is not so complicated. The reason for r&d to understand business is to look for opportunities to create value context and become the head of value creation chain and the definer of value.

From this point of view, you can understand why many people who are interested in open source or are interested in participating in and developing technical standards are trying to dominate some new chain of value creation.

So when we talk about value, we tend to refer to some chain of value creation

Just like Vue, Yu Brook is at the top of the value creation chain, followed by Vue development team → active contributors → technical evangelists → excellent writers of Vue technical articles → Vue senior developers → Vue users.

To the number of seats, you in the chain of which position, more by the back of the more no what value yo 😀

Two ways to create value

At this point, we can try to summarize, there are basically two ways to create value

  • Get involved in a huge chain of value creation and go as high as you can
  • Look for opportunities to lead and create new value chains yourself

I won’t talk about the first one, but I’ll focus on the second one, because a lot of people try to follow the second one, but there’s a big mistake.

To create a value chain, you have to think of yourself as an entrepreneur

I’ve seen a lot of research and development students start their own open source projects, then promote a wave of publicity, no response, and then give up. There are also some people who started several projects in the company and used several new technologies, which brought some cool and interesting effects, but they gave up because it was not popular.

In fact, they are trying to take the second path, but failed, a big reason, I think, is that they did not do it with an entrepreneurial mentality, or they did it with a professional mentality.

What professional thinking, it is decided to the back of his head, with its professional identity, a job or a rank to define their of things to do, define its own borders, define the scope, you can do this kind of thinking is in itself a participatory thinking, suitable only for to participate in a chain of value creation, rather than a dominant or own creation. Because when you just participate, you don’t really think deeply about, what’s the audience for what I’m doing?

What is the market size?

Is there much demand?

Is there long-term investment value?

Can I copy that?

How do you minimize low cost validation?

Before starting a business, any entrepreneur must think about whether the target customers of the product I want to make, the current market size and resource input are replicable, and how to verify the feasibility and replicability with the minimum MVP. Analogies to our r&d work, where we might do some technical things because of some repetitive operation, or a component with a potentially common nature, or based on engineering requirements, if we were to do these things ourselves from scratch, from zero to one, do you think about that? What these questions actually reflect is whether it is worthwhile to do such a value creation chain. So in a nutshell

  • The replicability of this thing, if the current model runs, I can promote to a wider range, such as large teams, or even the industry
  • It minimizes the authentication cost, if I want to run a minimum prototype out to verify the feasibility and replication, required resources, is I a person, or someone else together, how long is the input, if the resource is too big, still can do in further looking for segmentation field smaller test, reduce investment?
  • Is the long-term value of this thing sustainable and scaling up into a larger project, from a small tool to a large platform?

As a team leader, I focus on team members for some technical reconstruction, or to introduce new technology to solve some problems, when we stood in the role of value creating, from 0 to 1 to do something, but never want to live in the problem, I will emphatically to stop this behavior, because in my opinion, This is just as stupid as countless people engaged in O2O and engaged in some resource-wasting projects. Those people even want to go ahead but don’t think clearly, while we start to engage in technological restructuring and technological products without thinking about them. These so-called local innovations are probably just a waste of resources.

The latter

As a business developer, don’t put yourself in the context of value. Everyone should put aside professional thinking and look at the work environment with entrepreneurial thinking. Then you will find that the opportunities are not as few as you think.

As the technical backbone of the team, do not blindly start to do some technical products, or technical reconstruction, or introduce new technology, if there is no good entrepreneur to lead these, then you should think about the above problems, whether to think fully, if not, then you are likely to make trouble for your team.

As a team leader, I should encourage and motivate team members to innovate with entrepreneurial thinking and explore potential entrepreneurial engineers in the team. Compared with real entrepreneurship, the risk of entrepreneurship here is obviously much lower. Also encourage the most career-minded engineers on your team to participate in the value creation chain initiated by entrepreneurial engineers, because truly valuable projects will never have room for just one or two people.