ScalingE BusinessDRY is a lesson that most developers learn early on -- the common idiom "Don't Repeat Yourself," standing for a best practice of not reusing the same code more than once.  It's a principle of object oriented programming, but one that's powerful enough to go way beyond codebases - it's a major principle of scalability in general.

Take your everyday routine for instance, if you're like me, you probably deal with a varying number of questions throughout your typical day.  Working on the Platform team here, my questions typically come from outside developers who are wondering about developing apps, and our APIs.  What I eventually came to realize is that many of the questions are similar in nature, sometimes identical even, and answering these same questions over and over simply wasn't a scalable way to do my job.

Enter documentation - which many of us simply scoff at and undervalue in importance.  No one likes to write documentation, but what may folks don't realize is that documentation creates a more scalable and efficient way to run any development team, business group or company in general.

Try this: the next time you get a question that you've heard and answered before, write down the answer in a doc, website, wiki or somewhere public where the information can be consumed without your involvement. (aside: the wiki here at HubSpot has grown immensely overtime, and though it can sometimes be difficult to navigate, it still proves immensely effective after all these years - when the company was younger though, it was awesome for situations like this, and I recommend it for any startup).  

What you should find as time passes and you continue to note these answers is that you've created an awesome FAQ for your job which will be really helpful for many people around you to see what you do and what sort of value you add.  Even better though, this FAQ has added scale to your job because you've automated and manual question answering that used to take up chunks of your day - questions can be answered more efficiently by directing the askers to this FAQ.

This practice is an example of how to take an excellent development practice and apply it to other parts of any business.

 


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