Friction is a signal

I spent a decade watching big teams struggle with the same problems in different clothes.

At Essence, it was reporting that took five people and three days to produce — and by the time it landed, the data was stale. At Call of Duty, it was growth operations that needed to move at the speed of a live game but were wired for quarterly planning cycles. In trading, it’s the same thing: latency, signal loss, system fragility that shows up exactly when you can’t afford it.

The industry changed but the friction never did. It always comes down to:

• A process that was built for a smaller team
• A tool that was chosen because it was popular, not because it fit
• A decision that gets made six times instead of once because nobody wrote down the answer

Most people treat friction as a tax you pay. I treat it as a signal — the system telling you exactly where to cut.

Find the friction. Remove it. Build the system.