About
I've spent over 20 years building software, long enough to watch the same pattern repeat. Companies grow by adding: another feature, another service, another integration. Adding more isn't the mistake. Customers want more, and shipping it is the job. What decides the cost is the way it's built. When a new piece is wired tightly into everything already there, the cost shows up on two sides at once. On the technical side, there are more moving parts, more things that can break, and more code that every future change has to account for. On the human side, more people have to keep coordinating so they don't undo each other's work, and that coordination overhead is a big one almost nobody counts. Together they're the real weight behind what we loosely call complexity, and they can climb far faster than the revenue those features bring in.
Much of that complexity was never asked for by a single customer. A customer pays for what your product does for them, not for the machinery behind it, so any part that doesn't trace back to real demand is pure cost. The reason it survives isn't that it's hidden. It sits in plain sight. It survives because nobody measures it, so it never gets questioned.
That's the work I do: I find ways to measure the cost of complexity, because it's rarely small. It's real, serious money. I'm writing a book about how to measure it, and as founder of Beamer I build software that puts numbers on it, so the call to keep or cut something rests on evidence instead of habit.
Based in Warsaw, I write and speak about operational efficiency, the real cost of technical debt, and how to grow without quietly drowning in your own systems.
The Economic Principle
Everything you build to satisfy demand will make you wealthier, but everything you build not to satisfy demand but ignoring it will make you poorer.
The Problem
Before product market fit, the strategy that made the company successful made sense. You were optimizing for product performance and you got it right. But product market fit is what Professor Clayton Christensen called the decoupling point, when the company must shift from optimizing for performance to optimizing for speed and flexibility.
Keeping the same strategy after you reached product market fit becomes a liability.
Product companies today survive on easy money. Capital subsidizes the inefficiency and keeps the pre-PMF strategy alive longer than it should. But the market is changing and capital is becoming less tolerant to inefficiency. Figuring out profitability later is no longer an option.
Scale by Subtraction
I challenge the idea that growth justifies bloated
overly complex systems. Customers demand product
performance, not the complexity behind.
Complexity never has real demand, and therefore,
the more complexity the more money it takes from your
pocket making the product less feasible.
Core Principles
- Every technical decision is a business decision with visible impact
- Well-defined boundaries enable independent product component evolution.
- Smaller product updates involve fewer people and put less at risk.
The Engineering Tax
I'm writing a book about the unmeasured costs that eat software product margins: the coordination overhead, the structural friction, and the complexity that never satisfies customer demand. The Engineering Tax gives engineering and business leaders a shared way to measure those costs and decide what's worth keeping.
Connect & Follow
Get In Touch
Let's exchange numbers
I don't publish my number openly, but you can request it here.
Curious what your complexity is actually costing you, or want to talk about scaling by subtraction? Reach out using the form below.