When the Game Changes After Product-Market Fit
We talked about sync tax, architectural embezzlement, and organizational protocol so far. Useful vocabulary for pointing at the mess. But there's a limit to what vocabulary can do in a board meeting. What changes in the next article is the instrument itself. The Total Cost of Complexity is the first formula introduced in The Engineering Tax, turning unmeasured dependencies, coordination meetings, and tangled maintenance into a single dollar figure. Only with that dollar figure does a strangler extraction become the only exit the math allows.
July 21, 2026 ยท Article 5