The additive habit
Every stage of growth generates a new candidate for a new tool. The team is stalling on X, someone finds a tool for X, the tool joins the stack. The team is stalling on Y, another tool. Over three years, most growth stacks quietly triple in size.
Occasionally this is the right move. Usually it isn't. What's usually true is that the tool didn't fix the problem — it just added another translation to the working week.
“More tools rarely produce more growth. Fewer tools, better connected, almost always do.”
The collapsing move
The collapsing move is not about budget. It's about coherence. Which tools can be replaced by a shared layer that reads across them? Which of those tools were only necessary because the shared layer didn't exist?
Teams that run this exercise honestly usually find they can remove three or four tools without losing capability, and often find their team spends less time reconciling across systems as a result.
