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Detail of Joaquín Torres-García's 'Construction in White and Black' (1938), glue tempera on cardboard mounted on wood. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

SharpenCX: From Firefighting to Fearless Delivery

How a PE-backed contact center platform transformed its engineering organization – shipping more in Q3 than Q1 and Q2 combined – and was ready when an acquisition landed.

Detail of Marcel Duchamp's 'Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2' (1912), oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Next Bottleneck

Your engineering team just got faster. Congratulations! You’ve just moved the bottleneck. It’s not in engineering anymore. It’s downstream, in the space between what engineering can ship and what the business can absorb. Nobody is asking: faster for whom?

A closeup of a fire alarm on a wall. The fire alarm has text which says “FIRE. TO SOUND ALARM PULL DOWN”

Mind the blast radius

Not all work has the same risk profile, and to balance speed and safety, your process must adapt.

A view inside historic Hinkle Fieldhouse on the campus of Bulter University in Indianapolis, IN. Rafters like an airplane hanger above a basketball court and stands. Teams and cheerleaders await the national anthem before a game.

Stop Hogging the Ball

You got promoted because you were a great engineer. Now every time you grab the exciting work, you’re robbing your team of an opportunity to grow — and telling them you don’t trust them to do it.

A close up of a Jackson Pollock painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Give problems, not solutions

Don’t give engineers solutions. Give them problems.

Even if you’ve already solved it. Even if you can do it faster and quicker. Even if it seems simple. Even if there’s a time crunch.

A brass relief dating from the American Civil War featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Context is everything

Sometimes, polishing a turd of a product still makes something shiny to look at eventually.