Enterprise IT has been completely transformed by SaaS the past decade. Okta last week published a report that showed that the largest companies now use 175 apps, a doubling over the past few years. More professionals have more tools to do their jobs than ever before. It’s an explosion of creativity and expressiveness and operational latitude — but also a recipe for disaster.
It’s one thing to give people and businesses tools — and something else to train them to use those tools effectively. Worse, as the number and complexity of software has skyrocketed the past decade, it’s only become harder for end users to grapple with offering their customers the best possible experience.
That’s the opportunity for a range of new tools that are designed to guide — sometimes forcefully — people to use the software they have in the best possible way, in what you might dub “best practices as a service.” It’s software that is opinionated on what “best” looks like within its domain, and ensures that as many people follow that model as possible with minimal dissension. It’s simplicity-in-a-box for a complex world.
Let me give some examples from a few major fields of startups in e-commerce, security, web development and finally, in my chosen profession, writing to illustrate what I mean.
E-commerce has been one of the hottest areas of investment for VCs the past few months, and it is a space just flush with best-practices-as-a-service startups. Just in checkout platforms alone, we have had megarounds of investment in companies like Fast, Checkout.com, Bolt and Rapyd, and we have also seen a similar dynamic with online storefront builders like Shogun, which raised $35 million late last year.
What do all these platforms do? Well, they force online retailers to actually follow best practices around e-commerce to maximize conversion rates and basket size. Online storefront templates ensure that sites are responsive to different devices, are laid out well and are not hiding critical buttons (you know, like the “Buy” button) from customers. Meanwhile, checkout platforms like Fast are designed to collect payment details and shipping addresses as, well, Fast as possible while not losing the customer in the process (on top of a bunch of related services like risk and fraud mitigation).
Inputting credit card details isn’t a hard problem requiring brilliance. Online stores could do this in the 1990s with basic HTML. But there are best practices today on how to increase conversion rates with better design, and every sale counts. No wonder then that these companies collectively raised a billion dollars in venture capital the past few weeks.
Now let’s head over to cybersecurity. Cyber is really, really hard to get right in almost any context. As the SolarWinds crisis has shown, corporate security remains a huge priority to ensure the protection of data and trade secrets. Yet, many companies fail to put in place even the most basic rudiments of a security protocol.
Making security perfect is impossible, but it isn’t impossible to enforce best practices to mitigate the most obvious risks. So you have startups like Security Scorecard, which has raised nine figures in VC dollars, that will scan and track all of your security issues and give you a score on whether you are following best practices. Another example is Qualsys, which offers a popular SSL penetration test that does something similar for websites — giving a letter score for how secure a connection is to a particular server.
Cybersecurity professionals should know that certain cipher protocols are now deprecated, and that leaving a data server unencrypted and with no password is a recipe for a breach. They should know, but often, they miss things. That’s the reality of a complex world, and where these software packages can come in and enforce standards that are widely known in the industry to be helpful.
Now take web development. Given a standard Jamstack and a globally available CDN, nearly all websites besides the most interactive should be able to load instantaneously. Yet, we click around the web and find that there are sites that are far less performant than expected.
In this case, it wasn’t a startup but a service that tried to help. Google developed accelerated mobile pages (AMP) to enforce a set of standards around web performance. There is nothing “brilliant” about these standards, which range from ensuring that the page loads in the right order and isn’t waiting on a script download, to making sure image sizes aren’t wildly overstretched and the payload of a site is as optimized as possible. Similar to cybersecurity professionals, software engineers should know all this and execute on it, but laying out a clear standard for engineers has forced many sites to improve their performance for the better.
Finally, let’s turn to my modus operandi of writing. This afternoon, I got a demo of Axios’ new AxiosHQ platform, which will debut next week on February 8 after a lengthy and fairly public beta period. It’s an attempt to bring the publisher’s dare-I-say iconic “smart brevity” to corporate communications (“The bottom line,” “Why it matters,” “Yes, but,” “Between the lines” and the always favorite “But, but, but”). The AxiosHQ editor gives pointed suggestions to users, informing them that their headlines are too long or telling them to bold key points and cut their length or to use more bullet points and cut more sentences. If it isn’t clear, the key strategy is less words — always less words — and it constantly pushes its users to cut verbiage from every piece of their message.
That writing model is in line with companies like Textio, an “augmented writing” platform that highlights job postings to optimize performance and ensure sexist and discriminatory language isn’t used, or Grammarly, which is increasingly aggressive in improving writing through grammar suggestions using its NLP and AI models.
As a writer, these platforms have frankly horrified me. How can managers not know how to write succinct emails? How can recruiters not know how to write a job posting? How do people not know the basics of language and style and form?
Yet, as the world proves, many and maybe even most people can’t handle the rudiments of writing, much as the average web developer can’t develop a performant site, cybersecurity professionals can’t maintain security and e-commerce vendors don’t understand that the “Buy” button shouldn’t be placed six clicks down in the hamburger menu.
What best-practices-as-a-service platforms like all the aforementioned do is enforce guardrails against compromising key functionality for other goals. Maybe you want that massive picture of an igloo on your site. AMP will ensure you don’t do that. Maybe you think your summary of a meeting is going to turn you into the next James Joyce, and you just need to share your 10,000 word summary to 5,000 other company employees. AxiosHQ will scream at you “But, but, but no!” Maybe a senior executive wants to loosen the security protocol in the IT department to juice those sales — Security Scorecard will attempt to stop that harebrained strategy.
William Gibson is oft-quoted for his line that the future is here, it’s just not equally distributed. Well, performance is here in a lot of domains, but it’s not that well-distributed either. What we are learning in many fields is that the best practice defaults matter, and should really, truly be respected unless you really, really, really know what you are doing (and if you think you know what you are doing, you probably don’t).
In short, if the last generation of software was about giving everyone access to a full chest of tools to allow them to build software, launch online stores and write internal communications easily, the next generation of SaaS software has to take those abecedarian building blocks and forcibly guide users to using those tools in the best possible way. That’s a decade of startup work to be done — the good news is that these new best-practices tools might just help you build that world faster too.
Summary writing report
- 1,372 words, 6 minutes.
- 22 spelling and grammar mistakes and the illegal use of the word “abecedarian.”
- Axios Smart Brevity Score: Not Smart and Not Brevity. Number of bullet points below minimum.
- Checkout conversion flow to Extra Crunch: This is behind the paywall you dolt.