We’ve Always Had Problem Solvers
Large organisations are full of people who care. People who spot friction, feel the pain of broken workflows, and want to do something about it. That instinct is good. It’s the kind of culture you want.
For a long time, the bottleneck was capability. Turning an idea into a working solution took time, resource, and technical skill. That friction, frustrating as it was, acted as a natural filter. Only the most important problems got solved. Everything else stayed on the backlog.
That friction is disappearing.
When Building Gets Easy, Everything Changes
AI tooling has fundamentally changed who can build and how fast. Designers, product managers, analysts, and engineers with limited coding experience can now create working solutions in hours rather than weeks. That’s genuinely exciting. But it creates a problem we haven’t fully reckoned with yet.
When building was hard, prioritisation happened by default. Now that it’s easy, we need to be deliberate about it. And most organisations aren’t.
The Abundance Problem
What I’m seeing, both inside large organisations and across the industry, is an explosion of solutions.
Each one is well-intentioned. Each one takes time to maintain. Each one adds complexity to the systems around it. And because the cost to create has dropped, these solutions accumulate faster than any team can meaningfully evaluate them.
The challenge isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s an abundance of them. And abundance without discipline creates noise.
External Versus Internal: The Same Problem, Different Consequences
This isn’t just a product problem. It’s equally true for the tools we build for ourselves.
Customer-facing solutions tend to go through some level of rigour. There’s a roadmap, a business case, research, sign-off. It’s imperfect, but the process exists.
Internal tooling rarely gets the same treatment. Someone spots a problem, a quick prototype becomes a permanent fixture, and suddenly there’s a tool in production that nobody formally chose to build. It doesn’t have an owner. It doesn’t have documentation. It doesn’t get retired when it stops being useful.
Multiply that across a large organisation where dozens of teams have access to the same AI-assisted building capabilities, and you start to understand the scale of the problem.
The Question Nobody Is Asking
We’ve spent a lot of energy asking how to build faster. We’ve invested in tools, processes, and platforms to reduce the time from idea to shipped product.
What we haven’t done as well is ask which ideas deserve to exist at all.
Not every problem needs a tool. Not every inefficiency needs to be automated. Some friction is load-bearing. Some problems are better solved by changing a process, a conversation, or a habit than by adding another layer of software on top.
In a world where anyone can build almost anything, the most important skill isn’t building. It’s deciding what not to build.
What Might Help
I don’t think this is a solved problem, and I’m not sure a single answer exists. But a few principles feel worth holding onto.
Treat internal tools with the same rigour as external ones. If it’s going to need maintenance, it deserves a business case.
Build smaller and slower on purpose. The ability to move fast doesn’t mean you should. Deliberate, testable steps are more valuable than rapid accumulation.
Make the cost of building visible. AI makes creation feel nearly free, but it isn’t. Every tool has a maintenance burden, a dependency, an opportunity cost. Naming that cost changes the conversation.
Ask the uncomfortable question early: are we building this because it solves a real problem, or because we can?
An Honest Admission
I’m still figuring this out too. Working in a large organisation with access to powerful AI tools means I face these questions regularly. The temptation to build is real. The instinct to solve is real.
But the best outcomes I’ve seen come from teams that stay focused. Teams that resist the pull of what’s possible in favour of what’s important.
That discipline is harder than it sounds when building has never been easier.