When I joined my current company full time in 2021, I found a product/engineering org littered with complexity. Various people had tried to install all sorts of systems on the product/engineering side; scrum, agile, rituals here, manifestos there, automations everywhere. In that context, they had also hired new people with the idea of going faster. It was near the end of covid and people thought the financial free for all would last forever.
I found that situation incredibly flammable. It was like someone had poured kerosene into a poorly constructed engine and was about to ignite it.
So I went to work. I canceled 95% of rituals like daily standups that served no purpose but to keep up the appearance of progress. I analysed, then canceled software subscriptions for tools that could be replaced by GitHub or Slack. There was a transition period but ultimately we started shipping more, faster.
Then last year, I did the same for the customer success org, which was also in a dire state.
Now it’s 2025, 4 years later, and we’re serving more customers with a substantially smaller team. I’m proud of that achievement because I saw what was coming and was able to turn the situation around by focusing on my favourite mantra: complexity fails, simplicity scales.