Worse off without it

A thing is useful when we are worse off without it. Feature list and horizontal expansion is grand, most orgs are still facing the classical problem of data migration being expensive and ineffective, all impacted domains having change fatigue, reporting changes dictated by regulators with shorter and shorter implementation timelines, meanwhile there exists 23.5 data tools in the org each uniquely useful at 4.25% and near impossible to deprecate due to prior contract, opaque customisation by ‘Cameron that no longer works here’, and distributed data ownership. The problem is far from solved.

In the reality of an enterprise machine, usefulness never linearly grows from number of features, it boils down to the tool’s capacity to reduce organisational complexity/friction to outcomes, or at the very least, not make it worse.

The best products don’t create work, they remove it.