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A CTO’s Guide to Managing Complexity
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I have yet to meet a CTO who deliberately sets out to build a complex technology platform.
Nobody walks into a design review and says:
“Let’s make this unnecessarily complicated.”
And yet, give a technology organization a few years, a few acquisitions, a few hundred engineers, three cloud providers, five vendors, two generations of architecture and a handful of regulatory requirements, and somehow you end up with exactly that.
Complexity rarely arrives as a single architectural decision.
It accumulates.
A new service here.
A new integration there.
A temporary workaround that becomes permanent.
A database created because the existing one “wasn’t quite right.”
A vendor brought in because “we need this capability quickly.”
Another abstraction added because the previous abstraction wasn’t flexible enough.
None of these decisions are necessarily wrong.
In fact, most of them are perfectly reasonable when viewed in isolation.
