How Small Changes Can Drive Big Results Without Blocking the Business

Software serves the business, not the other way around. Yet many technical teams struggle to balance improving their code with delivering value. This blog explores why lean, incremental change often wins over big-bang rewrites, and how small, accessible improvements can unlock results, foster a culture of ownership, and create many leaders, not just one.

Big-Bang Rewrites: More Than Just Starting Over

When we talk about a big-bang rewrite, most people imagine throwing away the whole codebase, choosing a new language or architecture, and rebuilding everything from scratch. And yes, that’s the classic example. But the idea goes beyond that.

A big-bang rewrite can also mean any change that’s large in scope, takes a long time to complete, and delays visible value to the business. It could be a refactoring project, a redesign of a critical module, or a deep integration task. The common factor is that it puts other work on hold or requires long periods of planning and coordination before any outcome can be delivered.

If your work:

• involves a long stretch without deployable results
• requires other teams to wait until you’re done
• needs detailed up-front planning before anything starts
• or puts the system in a state where changes are frozen for a while

…then it might be closer to a big-bang approach than you think, even if you’re not rebuilding everything from zero.

Now, this doesn’t mean these changes are bad. Sometimes they’re necessary, especially when the foundations are no longer fit for purpose. But they do carry risks. They slow down feedback, delay business value, and can quietly block momentum if not managed carefully.

The alternative isn’t “never do big work.” It’s to approach change in a way that’s gradual, visible, and allows teams to keep moving while improving.

Why Lean, Continuous Change Works

Instead of going big and bold, lean thinking says: keep moving, keep improving, and don’t stop delivering. Martin Fowler describes refactoring as small, safe steps that don’t break existing behavior. That’s the sweet spot. Clean things up, one slice at a time, while still shipping features and fixing bugs.

This idea isn’t just theoretical. Companies like Amazon got their deploy time down to every 11.6 seconds. That’s not a typo. They managed this by breaking work into tiny, safe pieces and automating everything around it. High-performing teams in the State of DevOps reports follow the same pattern: small batches, fast feedback, fewer incidents, and happier devs.

The lean mindset, and kaizen in particular, teaches us to chase continuous improvement, not through big dramatic overhauls, but through small daily wins. It’s less stressful, more sustainable, and easier to build into the team culture.

The Bottleneck: Only a Few People Can Make Things Better

Here’s a common trap. You run a retro, come up with great ideas, and assign action items. But then nothing happens. Why? Because only a few people on the team have the tools, the authority, or the confidence to make the change.

In big projects, this gets worse. You’ve got multiple teams, different levels of experience, some folks can edit the core logic, others can’t touch it. So while a few people discuss fixing things, the rest of the team is waiting, unsure if they can help.

When change is locked behind experience or seniority, it slows everyone down.

Ask This Question Instead

It’s a simple question, but it changes everything. Small improvements are easier to explain, easier to adopt, and easier to measure. And because they’re small, more people can actually do them.

You don’t need a 3-week planning cycle to rename a misleading variable. You don’t need a Jira epic to make that one SQL query readable. These little things matter. And when done right, they stack up fast. Your next smallest change could be different from the examples above, you just need to define what “small” means for your team.

The more people you include in improving the system, the more improvement you get. Even better, you’re building new leaders. Not by giving out job titles, but by letting people take ownership of something and deliver real value.

Small Wins, Big Momentum

Short-term wins are essential for lasting change. People need to see results. Nobody wants to feel like they’re pushing a rock uphill forever.

When a team sees that a tiny fix made something faster, more stable, or less painful, they start believing in the process. It’s no longer theory, it’s real. And it encourages the next fix. And the one after that.

Small changes reduce the risk of failure. If something breaks, it’s easy to revert or adjust. There’s no panic, no long outage, just a quick fix and move on. Compare that to a big-bang release that fails. That’s a disaster no one wants to repeat.

Momentum comes from motion. Keep the changes small, and the motion never stops.

Real-World Proof

This isn’t just blog talk. Plenty of companies live by this philosophy:

• Walmart switched from a few giant releases per year to deploying daily. One of their lead engineers kept asking “What’s the smallest change we can make today?” That single question helped them build a culture of fast, safe improvement.

• Netflix Switched to “Operate what you build” culture. They empower developers to take ownership of their code, from writing it to running it in production.

• Microsoft used to ship major Windows updates every few years. Now, features and fixes come monthly. That shift started by shrinking the size of changes and giving more control to more teams.

Final Thought

You don’t need a revolution to make your system better. You just need to start. Right now. With something small.

Ask your team: what’s one thing we can improve today? Keep doing that. Every sprint. Every week. Every time someone touches the code.

You’ll fix things. You’ll move faster. And you’ll create an environment where more people feel like they can lead.

Forget waiting six months to deliver the perfect system. Make it better today. Then do it again tomorrow.

That’s how you build real progress. Tiny, steady, unstoppable.