Daily Reading - Sunday, June 16 2013

Outsourcing and Limiting to Core Competencies are Essential

The leanest companies will identify as few core competencies as possible, and outsource everything else. Instagram’s initial core competencies were (a) software development of image filters, (b) iPhone photo-sharing application development, and (c) driving adoption. 14 employees can handle that. When you throw in the other things I listed above, they’d need at least double the staff—so they outsourced, for example, to Amazon Web Services (server + network administration).

85% of all developer time must be spent on business-specific logic