Best of Need: Or how to coin a term to generate irrelevant buzz
“Best of Need” is a fresh coat of paint on an old door. Honest consultants have been having this conversation since the first composable decks: spend where it matters, live with “good enough” where it doesn’t and design so you can change your mind without burning the building down. Rebranding that as something newly enlightened doesn’t make it new. It makes it marketable. The only surprise is how quickly a term like this earns gravitas once a few big logos repeat it on stage and in PDFs; suddenly it looks like a revelation rather than a reminder. Even the MACH crowd and major vendors have adopted the phrasing, which tells you more about positioning than about practice.
If you want a picture instead of a slogan, imagine a fabric stretched in space. Every time you pull up one point the cloth creases and other areas dip. You cannot raise everything to the ceiling. Tension redistributes. Strategy is choosing where the fabric stands tall because that’s where value compounds and where you’re content to let it sit lower because raising it buys you nothing your customers would pay for. That’s not “Best of Need.” That’s just grown-up architecture. The only way it works is if the fabric can move: contracts that let you exit, boundaries that let you swap, data that can be lifted and interfaces that survive change. Spend where it matters always works, but only if the system remains extendable and replaceable. Otherwise “need” becomes an alibi for lock-in with better copy.
When I sit with C- and D-level buyers, we don’t argue labels. We draw the map. First we make sure the business can actually do its job: sell products, collect money, deliver on time. That usually means a reliable commerce engine, sane product data, taxes that don’t surprise anyone, stock that’s real and logistics that tell the truth. Depending on size and throughput, this is where the first big pull on the fabric lives. Then we move to the moments customers notice. Do they actually need sharper search, more relevant recommendations, richer content? Or is their frustration elsewhere, in a fragile checkout, a brittle returns loop, a loyalty scheme that never shows up when it matters? Finally we look at the internal pains that leak into margin: where automation will pay for itself, where tracking and tracing reduce support, where operational toil keeps teams from shipping. We walk this route not because frameworks say so, but because it traces budget to outcomes the board can recognise: conversion, margin, sometimes lifetime value. If “Best of Need” helps anyone hear that, fine, but the work predates the hashtag.
The place this goes wrong is when the label replaces the thinking. “Best of Breed” turned into buying a Ferrari for the school run. “Best of Need” risks turning into buying a family saloon and pretending it’s a sports car. Both miss the point. You’re not optimising for virtue; you’re optimising for leverage. Your customers tell you where leverage lives; your architecture determines whether you can take advantage of it. If your edges are composable and your dependencies are honest, you can pull up the right points and adjust as the market moves. If you’re trapped in deep integrations and long contracts, “need” will be whatever the vendor roadmap says it is. Lock-in is not only a commercial cost; it’s an opportunity cost measured in quarters lost to the wrong bet while competitors move.
There’s also a cultural smell I listen for. Teams who love labels tend to make binary choices and then defend them to the death. Teams who love outcomes tend to ask better questions and change their minds faster. The former argue about philosophy. The latter instrument the journey and measure. They don’t fall in love with their tools; they fall in love with the moments where customers say “that was easy.” They budget like adults, accept that every new pull in the fabric creates dips elsewhere,and document those trade-offs so no one is surprised when something sits lower by design. That is the conversation buyers deserve, not a warmed-over term presented as a breakthrough.
If you insist on using “Best of Need,” earn it. Show me where the fabric stands tall and why. Show me the KPI you’re pulling up and the telemetry that will tell us if it moved. Show me the exit costs, the SLOs and the seams you kept loose so you can change your mind when customers do. If you can’t do that, you don’t have a strategy. You have a buzzword with a budget.
This post was created as part of a larger campaign on composable commerce. Follow along for more post like this one.
