Make the Right Things Easier
Fix the friction that fuels burnout, slows teams, and breaks systems.
This week’s notes hit on something many teams feel but few name:
Burnout, broken architecture, and slowing velocity often share one root cause: friction.
Not dramatic mistakes. Just subtle, cumulative resistance—across tools, handoffs, knowledge, and clarity.
Here’s what stood out:
1. Silos Are a Tax, Not Just Debt
When decisions live in heads instead of docs, your team pays compound interest on every new hire, bug, and outage.
→ Make documentation a first-class artifact. Ask: What critical info lives in just one brain?
2. You’re Probably Carrying Process Debt
Tech debt isn’t just in code. Manual deploys, tribal workflows, and ad hoc testing slow you down just as much.
→ Map friction. Automate or document it. Your team’s velocity will thank you.
3. Architecture Collapses from Confusion, Not Code
It’s not lack of skill—it’s lack of shared understanding.
→ If your team can’t explain your system in 30 seconds, you’re flying blind.
4. Design for the Right Friction
Great systems don’t make everything easy. They make the right things easy.
→ Optimize for secure defaults, safe experimentation, and aligned behavior.
5. Burnout Comes in More Than One Flavor
Not all burnout is about long hours. Complexity and lack of meaning do just as much damage.
→ Address overwork, overwhelm, and under-purpose—or risk losing your best people.
This Week’s Core Message
Friction is the invisible force dragging your team down. Smooth what should flow. Add guardrails where needed.
That’s engineering leadership.
Actionable Experiments to Try This Week
Pick one undocumented process and write it up: Share it in your team Slack. Invite improvements.
Run a quick “architecture in plain English” drill: Can everyone explain the system the same way? If not, work to fill in the gaps and align knowledge.
Ask your team to rate burnout across hours, complexity, and purpose. Tackle the one you’ve ignored longest.