A Perfectionist’s Misstep

Does recognition mean things will calm down?

Not quite.

Being seen often means being trusted with even more difficult challenges.
At least, that’s what happened to me.

After a reorg, I was handed the responsibility to lead the refactor of our critical monolithic service into a Monorepo + Microservices architecture.

Why? Because the previous success made engineers happy, product managers happy, leadership happy—and R, my manager, very happy.

So naturally, he wanted to apply the same architecture to our most important system.

And me?
Honestly, I was resistant.
But I couldn’t leave the company just yet.
So even though it felt like surrender, I took the assignment… and looked for a way forward. (Just kidding… maybe.)

This time, though, things didn’t go so smoothly.
Let’s just say: there were complications.

When Idealism Meets Reality#

That critical legacy system?
Bloated, historically messy, tangled with deeply coupled logic—a minefield of technical debt.

I thought: this is the biggest architectural debt we’ve got.
Sooner or later, we’ll have to face it.

So I approached it from first principles:

• Start with interface-driven modularization
• Avoid shared instances
• Refactor toward loose coupling

I even designed an idealized decoupling strategy—hoping to clean up our mixed usage patterns once and for all.

Technically correct.
But too ideal.

With inconsistent usage, legacy decisions, and fuzzy module boundaries, this was less a refactor and more a rewrite.

Back to Reality#

Wanting to grow the team, I gave members autonomy—hoping they could apply the architecture knowledge we’d built earlier.

But during an OKR retro, we admitted it: progress had stalled.

We met to realign and found the real problem:
we were trying to do too much at once.

The project included:

• A framework upgrade
• Switching from JavaScript to TypeScript
• Architecture overhaul
• Infrastructure changes
• Deployment strategy updates

Everything was tightly coupled.
It wasn’t a codebase—it was quicksand.

Everyone was working, everyone was delivering,
but we couldn’t feel progress—because the next step always held the real results.

Reflection#

As PO and Tech Lead, I gave space—but not enough structure.
Time is a form of management.
Without clear boundaries, idealism became burnout.

Support and trust are crucial,
but so are focus and scope control.

The biggest lesson?
That perfect technical solution I obsessed over distracted me from solving the urgent problems in front of us.

Understanding the optimal path is a sign of technical maturity.
Sustaining delivery is what moves the business.

Knowing when to abandon elegance for progress is seniority.

The Shift#

We changed the strategy:

From: “Can we finish this?”
To: “Can we get something usable?”

We started with the foundations:

• Establish Monorepo
• Build reliable CI/CD
• Document clearly
• Provide reusable migration scripts

We made sure every contributor started on the same page.

From Me to We#

Each phase of delivery wasn’t just “done”—
it was usable, deployable, and handover-ready.

We moved in small, verifiable units.
We broke down features, introduced clear processes,
and built confidence—step by step.

We stayed closely aligned with product teams, listening to feedback and adjusting direction.
Our goal wasn’t to prove what we could build,
but to make everyone’s job easier.

This effort created the foundation for scalable implementation:

• Deliver in stages
• Decouple services incrementally
• Maintain a healthy Monorepo workflow
• Enable seamless onboarding across teams

It wasn’t just about speed.
It gave the org structural flexibility to scale people and systems.

A Staff Engineer Isn’t the Fastest#

That’s when I asked myself:

If I left tomorrow, could this still run without me?

I translated the logic in my head into:

• Decision logs
• Implementation guides
• Shared technical standards

I helped the team understand historical context and modular design principles—so knowledge could flow and accumulate.

My solo project became a team memory.

The Real Lesson#

The shift—from burning myself out to designing sustainable collaboration—was one of the most meaningful transformations of my career.

The real takeaway wasn’t about checking off milestones.

“If you want to go far, go together.”

That doesn’t happen by chance.
It takes intentional design and deliberate investment.

As a Staff Engineer, you’re not the one running the fastest.
You’re the one building the road so others can keep going.

Do I know how to do this perfectly every time?
No.
But I know I’m getting closer—one project at a time.