After nearly twenty years building software, leading engineering organizations, and working alongside executive teams, I've become convinced that growing companies rarely slow down because people stop working hard. They slow down because complexity quietly destroys leverage — not financial leverage, but the organization's ability to turn effort into outcomes.
I've watched engineering organizations double in size while delivery barely improved. I've watched leadership teams gain more visibility into their business than ever before, only to become slower at making decisions. From the outside, none of this looks like trouble. People are busy, roadmaps are full, projects are moving, software is shipping. Everything looks healthy. The difference is that every meaningful outcome now takes a little more coordination, another conversation, another review, another approval than it did a year ago.
Those costs are easy to dismiss, because each one is reasonable on its own. A large customer needs a special workflow, so you build one. A security incident exposes a gap, so you add a review. A team grows past the point where everyone can keep the work in their heads, so you add structure. None of those decisions are mistakes; each is the right call at the time. What none of them account for is the coordination they leave behind. The workflow has to be maintained, the review has to be staffed, the structure has to be managed, and each one adds a little overhead to work that used to happen without it. Individually, none of it matters. Together, it changes how the whole organization moves. Eventually you reach a point where the cost of coordinating the work exceeds the value the additional structure was meant to create. That's when leverage begins to erode — not because anyone did anything wrong, but because the reasonable decisions kept accumulating and no one was accounting for the sum.
Part of why this is so hard to catch is that complexity never arrives as a crisis. There's no meeting where someone proposes making the company slower. It arrives one defensible decision at a time, and no single decision is big enough to change the organization's trajectory. The cost only shows up in aggregate, by which point it's already part of how the company works. You can't point to the decision that caused it, because there wasn't one. There were hundreds.
This is also why the friction rarely comes from incompetence. More often it comes from success. Successful companies accumulate systems, processes, exceptions, approvals, and layers precisely because each one solved a real problem at the time. Yesterday's solutions have a way of quietly becoming today's limits.
I remember a planning meeting where the question on the table was whether to hire another engineering team. What stayed with me afterward wasn't the decision — it was that no one in the room could explain why the last team we'd added hadn't increased throughput. We had the budget and a clear case for more people, and no good answer for why more people had stopped turning into more output. The hire still made sense on paper, so we approved it.
That reflex is the one I've come to watch for. Once an organization feels the friction, the instinct is often to build around it. Planning has gotten slow, so we add a layer of coordination on top of it. Teams can't align, so we hire someone to manage the alignment. The codebase is hard to change, so we add engineers to move through it carefully together. It's why so much new technology, including AI, gets pointed at making a slow process run faster instead of asking whether the process should exist at all. Each response is rational, and each one adds coordination cost to work that already wanted more clarity. Eventually the organization is no longer improving how the work moves. It has been designed around the friction.
So when something slows down, the question I've learned to ask first isn't how to make people more productive, and it isn't which tool or reorg to reach for next. It's where the organization has quietly stopped converting effort into outcomes — and then, why. The answer is sometimes technical, sometimes organizational, sometimes a matter of product or incentives. The question doesn't.
I've stopped thinking of leverage as something an organization restores once. It's something leadership has to protect continuously.
Where has leverage been lost?