💃 Is Your Tech Stack a Junk Drawer?🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! Every house has one-

🚮 The drawer with three crusty rubberbands.

🚮 A fistful of mystery keys, batteries with foam coming out the tops 🫣.

🚮 The manual for a bread maker you donated in 2019.

Nobody planned that drawer. It filled up with one "we'll just toss this here for now" at a time.

Your tech stack filled up the same way. The average enterprise now manages 291 SaaS applications, with roughly half of those licenses sitting unused 🤦.

Translation for your CFO 👉 you are paying rent on a drawer you're afraid to open.

ONE “FOR NOW” AT A TIME

Sprawl Happens…

💸 Marketing buys a point solution during a campaign crunch.

💸 Sales ops starts a trial that quietly auto-renews.

💸 A departing director leaves behind two tools nobody else can log into.

IT inherits all of it…plus the blame 😭.

And it happens inside platforms too.

Salesforce ships new automation layers, AI rebrands, and you’re still paying rent on that failed Experience Cloud implementation. Your org carries every generation of bad tech decisions.

Each addition made sense at the time. The pile staring at your budget makes no sense. That's the junk drawer's whole business model.

THE HUB GETS THE HEAVIEST VOTE

How Do You Prevent Tech Sprawl at Your Company?

Index your decisions on the hub. For most companies that's Salesforce, the most-used and most expensive business app on the books.

So every new tool request starts with one question- can the platform we already pay for do this at 80%? If yes, the burden of proof flips to the new tool.

Then enforce two rules that fit on a sticky note:

💥 One in, one out. Every new tool names the tool it kills. No corpse, no contract.

💥 Every tool gets an owner and an expiration date. Unowned software is how CIOs end up diverting 10 to 20 percent of their new-product budget into cleaning up tech debt. That's a fifth of your innovation money doing janitorial work.

Consolidation onto the hub isn't free, though. The Complexity Tax is real- architects, data cleanup, and change management. Pay it deliberately, or pay the sprawl tax accidentally.

DEFENDING THE JENGA TOWER

Why Sprawl Quietly Wrecks Your Best People

Yup, it gets worse👇

When your team spends its days steadying a wobbling tower of overlapping tools, they stop building.

They under-invest in the ambitious projects and over-invest in defensive maintenance.

Then your strongest builders leave, because talented people want to cook 🧑‍🍳, and you've got them reorganizing the drawer 😡.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

As an executive, can you answer these questions-

❓ Can Salesforce, which we already pay for, do 80% of what this other app is doing?

❓ Which existing tool dies when this new one arrives?

❓ Who owns this tool's renewal, and when does it expire? What subscriptions are ending, what can we retire this year?

The best-run companies treat their stack like a chef treats a station- everything visible, everything used, everything earning its spot. Mise en place.

Sprawl prevention is a subtraction habit, practiced quarterly, indexed on the hub.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes