When Solutions Get Fixed

As a company grows, so do its processes. At first, it’s all about building fast and solving problems. But once you hit a certain size, things like SOC 2, GDPR, and compliance become part of everyday operations. These changes are well-intentioned. They’re meant to protect the company and its customers, but they often overreach. And when they do, they don’t just add structure. They reduce efficiency.

I used to work at a startup small enough that I could talk to clients directly. I understood their problems firsthand and could fix them quickly. But while I was doing that, the company was growing. Processes were being implemented to help us scale, to make us look more “enterprise,” to be compliant in our industry.

Then the switch flipped.

Data I used to access freely was suddenly marked as PII (Personally Identifying Information). And just like that, I could no longer explore the database to troubleshoot a client issue or to investigate a trend. Blanket rules were put in place: no production access for engineers, even for metrics that didn’t involve sensitive data. I could see some of the same data through our internal dashboard, but there was no way to pull it in aggregate or to filter it in meaningful ways.

So I did what engineers do… I found a way around it.

I wrote a script that called the dashboard’s client-side APIs with the parameters I needed. I packaged the data into a clean, readable report. At first, it was just for me. Then it became a tool we used across the company. It helped us onboard clients. It surfaced meaningful trends. It became the report: standardized, automated, and widely shared.

Months later, someone asked: “How are you generating these reports?”

I told them.

That’s when it all changed. Calling a client-side API from a script? Definitely not “the right way.” So leadership stepped in to make it official.

The workaround became a formal process. My button-press report turned into a nightly job that exported CSV files for every client. It wasn’t flexible. I couldn’t specify a date range. And the client-side API I used before? Blocked.

The new process required multiple steps to get the same results I used to get in seconds. It was slow, rigid, and frustrating. But it was approved. It was secure. It was “the right way.”

In other words, my working solution had been fixed.

What’s the Lesson?

This isn’t a complaint about compliance or security. They matter. This is about the unintended consequence of treating every workaround as a threat, instead of as a signal.

When someone finds a faster, better way to do something, especially under constraints, they’re not bypassing the system to be rebellious. They’re doing it because the system failed to serve their needs.

Instead of shutting down these solutions, organizations should ask:

• Why was the workaround necessary in the first place?
• What made it better than the official process?
• Can we integrate it without losing what made it useful?

Most “rogue” solutions are just the first draft of what the process should have been. But too often, they’re sanitized into something slower and less effective in the name of structure.

That’s how you fix a solution… by breaking it.

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