Everyone Can Build. Few Know Why.

Scroll through LinkedIn and you’ll see it everywhere: Dashboards built in a weekend. Python scripts spun up in an hour. AI-powered apps launched on a whim.

And often, in between the launches and demos, the declarations start: This tool is dead. That workflow is over.

But most of the time, it’s not about what’s dead - it’s about what’s misunderstood, misapplied, or used without purpose. The tool doesn’t matter as much as the intent behind it.

And that’s what I keep coming back to. I find myself asking: why? Why was it built? Who asked for it? What changed because of it?

And too often, the answer is: “Because I could. It was free. It looked good in a demo. It was easy.” But no one stopped to ask if it actually mattered.

We’ve made building easy. But we’ve made thinking optional. That’s the real problem.

Software isn’t just code.

It’s not the dashboard. Not the script. Not the automation.

It’s the thinking behind it. The clarity. The discipline. The outcome.

Software companies don’t just build, they support, challenge, and guide. The real value isn’t in what’s shipped. It’s in what’s solved.

The energy industry doesn’t need more tools.

It needs better decisions. Less dashboards. More direction. Less activity. More impact.

In subsurface especially, the goal is simple: Data → Insight → Decision → Action. Break that chain, and value disappears.

Yet we’re overwhelming teams with dashboards, tools, and options - without always asking what will actually help.

The energy industry doesn’t need another dashboard or another model trained on slightly cleaner logs. It needs clarity - and the discipline to choose simplicity when it delivers more.

Tools are easy. Focus is hard.

This isn’t a tooling problem. It’s a focus problem.

Hick’s Law: more choices slow people down. Decision fatigue: too many decisions = worse outcomes.

We’re not building clarity. We’re building cognitive drag.

And we see this play out everywhere, from internal tooling to large-scale, open industry platforms that have taken years to build.

Codebases grow. Working groups multiply. Standards emerge. Everyone is contributing, building, refining. But still, the question lingers: Why is it taking so long? What exactly are we trying to achieve?

The truth is: when everything feels important, nothing is prioritized. When everyone is building, but no one is curating, complexity wins.

It’s easy to measure progress by lines of code. Harder to measure it by clarity of outcomes. And yet, that's the metric that matters most.

We don't just need scalable platforms. We need solvable problems.

Real innovation isn’t fast, it’s focused.

That starts with product thinking. With asking:

• Who is this for?
• What decision will it change?
• What happens if we do nothing?
• And how will we know if it worked?

It’s not about building more. It’s about building what matters.

The advantage isn’t building faster, it’s knowing what to build, why it matters, and how to make it last.

Not waiting for perfect data. Not polishing inputs endlessly.

Because real progress rarely starts with perfection - it starts with clarity. With intent. With action. Sometimes that means building. But often, it means choosing the solution that gets you there faster - and focusing your energy where it counts.

The future won’t be defined by who writes the most code. It’ll be shaped by those who bring focus to complexity. Who step back at the right moment, draw a line, and say: This is what matters now.

Not the ones waiting for the cleanest dataset or the most complete spec - But the ones who know that "good enough and purposeful" beats "perfect but postponed."

Because every industry hits its inflection point. The smart ones don’t power through it blindly.

They pause. Realign. And rebuild - with purpose.

Build less. Solve more. That’s how we move energy forward - through clarity, not noise.

If this resonates, you’re not alone. These are real challenges across energy, tech, and beyond. As a younger product manager, I remember how hard it was to find people in energy willing to talk openly about them. Always happy to talk it through - clarity gets better when it’s shared.