Abundance: Why Having “Enough” Isn’t Enough Anymore

Part 1 of 4: The Four Pillars of Progressive Delivery

Do you remember when getting a new server for your development team required a three-month approval process, a capital expenditure request, and a facilities team to rack and stack hardware? Those days feel like ancient history, but they shaped an entire generation of software development practices around scarcity.

Today, you can spin up virtually unlimited computing resources with a credit card and an API call. Storage costs have plummeted to nearly zero. Network bandwidth that once required dedicated T1 lines now flows through your smartphone. We’ve moved from an era of technological scarcity to one of unprecedented abundance.

Yet many organizations still operate with a scarcity mindset, and it’s costing them the ability to deliver software progressively.

What Abundance Really Means

In the context of Progressive Delivery, abundance isn’t just about having more compute power or storage space. It’s about having more than enough of all the resources required to accomplish your tasks—without friction, without waiting, without asking permission.

This includes:

• Infrastructure resources: Compute, storage, bandwidth that scales elastically
• Development tools: Modern IDEs, CI/CD pipelines, testing environments
• Human resources: Time to experiment, fail, and iterate
• Financial resources: Budget to try new approaches without betting the company

Abundance enables a fundamental shift in thinking from “Why do you need that?” to “Is there any reason you shouldn’t have that?”

The Abundance Transition

AWS exemplifies this transformation. When it launched in 2006, the value proposition was revolutionary: stop spending money on “undifferentiated heavy lifting.” Instead of building and maintaining your own data centers, focus your energy on what makes your business unique.

This wasn’t just about outsourcing infrastructure—it was about transitioning from scarcity-driven decision-making to abundance-enabled innovation. Suddenly, a startup could access the same technological capabilities as a Fortune 500 company. The constraints shifted from “Can we afford this infrastructure?” to “What should we build with unlimited infrastructure?”

Abundance in Action: The Netflix Evolution

Netflix’s journey from DVD-by-mail to global streaming platform illustrates abundance thinking in practice. In the early 2000s, streaming video required massive infrastructure investments that only the largest media companies could afford. Netflix made a crucial bet: instead of trying to minimize infrastructure costs, they would invest abundantly in building streaming capabilities before they were profitable.

This abundance mindset extended beyond technology. They invested heavily in content before knowing if original programming would work. They built global infrastructure before having global content deals. They automated customer service, recommendation systems, and content delivery to handle massive scale.

Each of these decisions seemed wasteful from a scarcity perspective—why spend money before you know it will work? But abundance thinking recognizes that in a rapidly changing environment, the biggest risk isn’t waste—it’s insufficient capacity to adapt.

The Hidden Costs of Scarcity Thinking

Organizations that maintain scarcity mindsets in an abundance world pay a steep price:

• Innovation bottlenecks: When developers have to justify small experiments, creativity suffers. The cognitive overhead of resource requests often exceeds the cost of the resources themselves.
• Slow feedback loops: Limited testing environments mean longer cycles between idea and validation. You can’t iterate quickly if each iteration requires approval.
• Risk aversion: When failure is expensive, teams avoid the experimentation that drives breakthrough innovations. Conservative decisions feel safer but lead to competitive disadvantage.
• Talent frustration: Top developers expect modern tooling and fast feedback loops. Scarcity-driven organizations struggle to attract and retain the people who drive innovation.

Abundance Without Waste

The counterargument is obvious: unlimited resources lead to unlimited waste. And there’s truth to this concern. Organizations that embrace abundance without guardrails often see spiraling cloud costs, over-engineered solutions, and feature bloat.

The solution isn’t to return to scarcity thinking—it’s to pair abundance with intelligent automation and alignment. AWS discovered this when they created FinOps practices to help organizations spend wisely while maintaining innovation velocity.

Progressive Delivery addresses this through what the upcoming book calls “the abundance equation”:

Abundance + Autonomy must be balanced by Alignment + Automation

Abundance without alignment leads to chaos. Abundance without automation leads to waste. But abundance properly channeled through Progressive Delivery principles enables sustainable innovation at scale.

Getting Started with Abundance

You don’t need unlimited budgets to begin thinking abundantly. Start by identifying your most constraining resource:

• Time constraints: Automate repetitive tasks so teams can focus on creative problem-solving rather than maintenance work.
• Infrastructure constraints: Move to cloud services that can scale elastically rather than trying to predict capacity needs.
• Approval constraints: Create pre-approved budget pools for experimentation, with clear success/failure criteria.
• Knowledge constraints: Invest in documentation, training, and knowledge sharing so insights don’t bottleneck on individual experts.

The goal is to remove friction from the creative process. Every minute spent waiting for resources is a minute not spent solving user problems.

Abundance as a Competitive Advantage

In the upcoming AI revolution, abundance thinking will separate winners from losers. The organizations that can afford to experiment with multiple AI models, test different integration approaches, and iterate rapidly on user feedback will pull ahead of those still operating from scarcity constraints.

This doesn’t mean reckless spending—it means strategic investment in capabilities that enable rapid adaptation. The companies that invested abundantly in cloud infrastructure, data platforms, and experimentation capabilities are now best positioned to leverage AI effectively.

The Abundance Mindset

Abundance is the foundation that makes the other three A’s possible. Without sufficient resources, autonomy becomes meaningless—teams can’t act independently if they don’t have access to what they need. Alignment suffers when everyone is competing for scarce resources. Automation requires upfront investment that scarcity thinking discourages.

When you embrace abundance thinking, everything else becomes possible. Teams can focus on creating value rather than managing constraints. Innovation becomes a systematic capability rather than a lucky accident.

The question isn’t whether you can afford abundance thinking. In today’s competitive environment, the question is whether you can afford not to embrace it.

Next week: Part 2 explores Autonomy—how abundance enables teams and individuals to act independently while staying aligned with organizational goals.

This series explores concepts from the book Progressive Delivery: Build The Right Thing For The Right People At The Right Time by James Governor, Kim Harrison, Heidi Waterhouse, and Adam Zimman (IT Revolution Press, November 2025).

- About The Authors

Leah Brown

Managing Editor at IT Revolution working on publishing books and guidance papers for the modern business leader. I also oversee the production of the IT Revolution blog, combining the best of responsible, human-centered content with the assistance of AI tools.

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