Notes on the unglamorous work that keeps a business running — vendor management, runbooks, dashboards people actually open, and the systems that survive a founder leaving the room.
Email is the default workflow tool, and it scales worse than any of the alternatives. The hidden cost shows up in the people you can't onboard.
Quarterly reviews are mostly performative. Three changes turn the meeting from a slideshow into a decision-making session.
Your firewall stops external attackers. The vendors you grant access to do not have to attack you to cause damage — they just have to be themselves.
The first useful step in automation isn't writing code. It's writing down what the manual process actually is — and discovering nobody agrees.
Most dashboards are unloved — built by someone who's left, populated with metrics from a previous pivot. The ones that get used share three properties.
