Focus is hard.

Building software is usually really intricate, but also fairly tedious. There are a lot of tools to help get past the tedium nowadays, but we tend to lose sight of the fundamentals in favor of what we feel like we should do. We copy what we see other admirable companies doing in the hope that their success will rub off onto our own process and we’ll see similar results.

Pick an architecture here, build an infrastructure there, pull in a process you read in some thought leader’s blog post, and before you know it you’ve built a nuclear power plant to power a lightbulb.

Years ago, Netflix famously unleashed a “Chaos Monkey”—a tool designed to randomly break their own systems. It was a brilliant solution to a problem of immense scale: how to ensure a global streaming service never went down.

And in the process, they accidentally created a trap that thousands of startups have fallen into ever since.

I saw it happen in real-time. Young, agile companies, who should have been obsessed with their first customers, were suddenly spending months building their own Chaos Monkeys. They were copying the complex solution without having the complex problem.

This is a pattern I see over and over in my advisory work. Teams get seduced by the siren’s call of complexity. They adopt the tools and processes of giants like Google and Netflix, believing that if they mimic the process, they will achieve the outcome.

The result? They bury themselves in something I call “Process Debt.”

It’s like technical debt, but sneakier. It’s the ongoing tax you pay for maintaining overly complex CI/CD pipelines, premature microservice architectures, and the poster child of modern overkill: the unnecessary Kubernetes cluster. It’s a constant drain on your most valuable resources—time, focus, and momentum.

Why do we do this?

• We’re trying to solve for a future scale we haven’t earned yet.
• We’re “bikeshedding”—focusing on complex technical problems to avoid the messy, ambiguous work of finding out what customers actually want.
• Frankly, it can seem more fun and look better on a resume.

In my latest article, I pull back the curtain on this phenomenon. I talk about the surprising power of a single server, why most startups under $10M in revenue should run from systems like Kubernetes, and how to use the “You Ain’t Gonna Need It” principle for your processes, not just your code.

The goal isn’t to build a beautiful, intricate machine. The goal is to solve a customer’s problem. And the path to doing that is almost always simpler than you think.

If you’ve ever felt the pull of a complex new technology or wondered if your team is over-engineering its infrastructure, this one’s for you.

You can read more about this in my article, You Aren’t Gonna Need The Chaos Monkey.

Cheers,

Jordan