Remember the product manager from this week’s live? Another department stopped going through him and his engineering team. They brought in a contractor who built the internal tools they wanted directly, with AI, in an afternoon. Nobody asked him to weigh in. The other department got the tools they wanted in hours instead of months, so they stopped coming to product. The company found a faster way to get what they used to come to him for, and his role might go with it. He could have shown them what those quick tools would cost the company down the line.
He never got the chance, so nobody in the room knew what they were missing by cutting him out.
Friday, I called this the Compounding bucket: the work that’s worth more the more your teams build. When every department can build its own tools this fast, someone has to see how those tools fit together and what each one costs the company over time. This skill gets more valuable the more your company builds. This article gives you a scorecard to measure this. You give an internal tool five scores, and it tells you what that tool will cost your company and whether you should back it, fix it, or flag it to leadership.
A tool that works today has cleared the lowest bar. It ran once, for one team, on the machines it was built on. What that tool costs your company shows up over the year that follows. Software maintenance and evolution runs to roughly 60%-80% of a tool’s total lifetime cost, and yearly upkeep alone often runs 15%-25% of what the tool cost to build. A tool a contractor builds in an afternoon costs far more than that afternoon. It brings a year of upkeep, security fixes, and support that nobody counted when they approved it.
A contractor building a tool for one department answers one question. Can I get this working for them now? That’s the right question for them to answer. Your value is answering the one their job doesn’t ask them to. What will this tool cost the company once it’s running, and does it work well with everything else your teams have built?