Recently I sat down to talk with Jeff Lawson from Twilio about his concept of “enabling doers” – essentially removing the barriers that make it difficult for developers to use Twilio to just get started and “give it a go”.

I was really interested to talk with Lawson as his views run parallel to my own about articulating technology in a way that real people can understand. It’s all about accessibility really. You see technical talk and the use of acronyms are a similar barrier to adoption by end users as are a lack of documentation, no “try before you buy” and lack of self-service are for the developer community.

I spend a lot of time talking with the really smart bunch of guys involved in customer enterprise development at Trineo. I’m always staggered by how nimble Trineo can be in terms of creating solutions, creating proofs-of-concept and rolling out point solutions (piece of advice, if you’re an enterprise looking for quick point solutions created by a nimble team of force.com and Heroku experts – you should talk with Trineo). It seems entirely obvious that in order to drive that nimbleness, Trineo needs to be able to access solutions quickly, rapidly and easily – even if they’re just playing with something at 3am on a Sunday morning. Having to wait till office hours to actually talk to someone who can provision a service is a massive barrier to the agility that developers like Trineo can deliver.

Lawson’s concepts might be stunningly obvious, but they’re also critically important for companies creating solutions that developers can do smart things with. Do yourself a favor and watch the video below and think about whether your company really follows the simple but effective advice from Lawson.