Over the past two years I’ve been increasingly focused on building innovative enterprise platforms — and I’ve noticed that the hardest part is always the same: the moment you leave the Proof of Concept behind and try to ship something real.
How is that still the case?
Reading this Harvard Business Review article on why great innovations fail to scale, I recognised myself immediately — and finally had a cleaner way to name a lot of my daily frustrations.
Apparently, I’m a bridger: a connector who mediates between user needs, business requirements, and technological complexity.
Three worlds that don’t naturally talk to each other — different teams, different skill sets, priorities that are often flat-out incompatible.
And yet someone has to make them talk. Because if nobody does, innovation dies right there — no one takes responsibility for translating between incompatible demands, and the whole thing quietly stalls.
The problem isn’t the technology. It isn’t the budget. In most cases, it isn’t even company culture.
The problem is that nobody wants to stand in the middle — to speak everyone’s language without fully belonging to any camp, to act as interpreter between a CEO who wants results in 90 days, an engineering team estimating 8 months, and end users who don’t yet know what they want.
In my experience, the jump from demo to production is the hardest transition of all.