Among all the routine follow-up emails from conference BDs desperately pushing paid speaking slots masked as sponsorships (still a mystery for us why pharmacovigilance industry accepts this flawed conference model…) and various similarly exciting offers, a seemingly ordinary newsletter by Deloitte looked like a rather lucky discovery of our CEO Dominik. 

Soon after, a group Slack conversation pointing to the very same email revealed he was in fact not the only one whose attention it caught. An unprecedented summary of what landed in the mailbox from our colleague Martti was: ‘yea just came in to share it, free food and drinks mentioned’. 

Reading that, it became perfectly clear to me why this message didn’t slip through.

Besides this, there was one little detail in the email of almost the same level of importance: “Tepsivo Oy has been selected for this year’s Deloitte Technology Fast 50 list. Warm congratulations!”

A controversial growth ingredient

The notion to immediately concentrate our emotions into a ‘Look at our success!’ LinkedIn announcement was surely strong. But to me, it felt like a milestone that actually deserves a bit more than a braggy post with conventional blah blah making everyone scroll even faster than usual.

First of all, we try to create different posts. Even more importantly, ‘different’ is how we do a lot of things.

And that’s actually the interesting point to talk about: so different that the majority of corporate employees might use a single, seemingly not so sexy word for our efforts:

‘Over-engineering’. 

I know. Not sexy at all. These days, everything seems to be marketed as streamlined, efficient, and smart.

But pause for a while: Is it really contradictory? What, if in the end, new market standards actually come from clever over-engineering? From perfectionism cautiously applied to little things that others downplay? 

It’s no secret that the most intuitive, seemingly simple user experiences are the result of incredible, hidden complexity. Something that naturally takes a huge amount of effort.

Throwing away quarterly blindness

Let’s align on the terminology first. Back in my early career days, I had an amazing boss who would call something that has been over-engineered an “overkill”.

By that, he meant a solution which was way too sophisticated and difficult to build, considering its business value. Simply put, the effort could be better used elsewhere with a higher return. 

But here comes the tricky part: Traditional companies look at the return through the narrow lens of only a certain timeframe and context. And from my experience, it often makes their judgment very limited. I would even use a stronger word in fact: flawed. 

To me, this is why ‘over-engineering’ actually makes sense – because if it makes sense to you today, then in a certain timeframe, there’s a high chance it will be appreciated by the market too.

This is exactly where quite an obvious space for industry challengers often emerges.

By the way, there’s clearly a name for people who see beyond standard limits – a visionary.

And while I don’t consider myself one, I find it interesting how we, as a society, put them on magazine covers and praise their sense of perfectionism, detail, extreme focus on a certain aspect that proved to be an industry game-changer…while these exact same characteristics hardly get appreciated at a quarterly planning meeting in the resource-oriented corporate reality.

When we decided to build Tepsivo in 2020, we knew our reality had to be different.

The extra juice is scarce (and that’s good!)

To depict how we understand smart over-engineering in Tepsivo, I felt like a little analogy would help a lot here. English definitely has popular sayings that could be potentially associated with over-engineering:

“Using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.”

“Bringing a freight train to deliver a postcard.”

“Boiling the ocean.”

The problem is, all these idioms kind of carry a hard-to-reframe negative connotation. More specifically, as Google Gemini puts it, these illustrate “acting in an unclever way, wastefully, and solving minor or futile problems”. 

Surely enough, that’s certainly not what we would advocate in Tepsivo. 

But take this one on the other hand:

“Building a cathedral for a parish of ten.”

Can you feel the difference? Using the words of Gemini again: “Here, the ‘overkill’ part is mainly about the mismatch in the audience size. And while conventional wisdom says you don’t build a cathedral for a parish of ten, we can argue that building the cathedral is how you grow the parish to ten thousand.” 

Bingo. This resonated with me. Seeing things from a different angle, you can reframe something generally viewed as an “overkill” to a masterpiece.

As a host of one of Lenny’s podcast episodes recently put it: “You get the extra juice that others don’t get”.

And looking back at Tepsivo’s journey over the 5 years since its beginnings, I would say building cathedrals truly seems to make sense.

Free food invites take time – but do come

To be fair, even when you set up your company like we did, it is not just industry applause all the way from the start. Ironically, putting extra effort into things that other businesses do “the standard” way doesn’t always bring you just benefits. 

You need to be prepared for the fact that literally everyone will question the way you do things. Some because they will not understand, some because they don’t want to understand. 

Still, if you’re convinced that the status quo is not good enough (just like we were with pharmacovigilance services), don’t hesitate to create something ambitious. And keep going. After all, the free food and drinks invite might be just around the corner for you too.

After some time, strategic over-engineering gives you so much traction that the rest of the industry just can’t keep up with you. Sure, challenging situations won’t stop – but you’ll be in a position where you can handle them with much more ease.

To all who managed to read this far: Build your cathedral – whatever that may be for you. The results will follow. 

And if nothing else, it is a great feeling.

Congrats to all in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Finland who made the ranking with us!