Binder
What kills companies
The deaths look different but the underlying pattern is consistent. Local optimization. Lost coherence. The metric replaces the mission.
Efficiency theater
The most common death. A company needs a turnaround, efficiency is the obvious lever. So you optimize each cylinder of the V8 individually — sales gets its playbook, dev gets its process, product gets its framework. Each function locally optimized. The sum performs worse than its parts. Strategic coherence disappears because no one is in charge of the whole engine.
The operator curse
Operators are brilliant at scaling processes. They are terrible for anything requiring creative judgment or bold bets. When operators run product organizations, they manage for optics — keeping presentations tight, hitting metrics, managing up. They stop deeply understanding users. Differentiation dies.
Snowflakes
One-of-a-kind custom implementations for individual customers. The money is seductive. The cost is the heat death of your software company. Snowflakes always increase complexity, always increase maintenance cost, always lengthen development cycles, and always handbrake scalability. The recovering addict’s logic applies: “just this once.” They end up making a habit of it.
The internal customer trap
When product teams start treating internal stakeholders as the customer, the backlog becomes a social contract. No means escalate. Every decision is political. The actual paying customer — the market customer — gets lost.
You need a dollar, or you need to save three. That’s the heuristic. Everything else is noise.
First-principles thinking in the wrong context
Enterprise software doesn’t follow clean first-principles logic. What works is proven patterns, market leverage, synergistic integration. The best companies don’t reinvent the playbook. They execute the known playbook better than everyone else.