We spent years at large technology companies — building platforms and products used by billions of people, leading engineering organizations across multiple continents, leading the meetings where roadmaps were decided. By most measures, we had made it. But somewhere along the way, the work stopped feeling like ours.
The reality of big tech is that scale comes at a cost. We spent more time navigating internal politics than solving hard problems. The products we built serve metrics dashboards, not people. The further up the org chart we went, the further we got from the craft that drew us to engineering and product in the first place. We found ourselves optimizing for things we didn't believe in — growth for growth's sake, complexity that justified headcount, roadmaps designed to impress executives rather than help customers. It was comfortable, well-compensated, and increasingly hollow.
So we left. We came together because we wanted to choose the work that gives us the most fulfillment — projects where our experience actually matters, where we can see the impact end to end, and where we answer to the quality of the outcome rather than the politics of the process. We pick our clients and our projects carefully, not because we're precious about it, but because life is too short to spend on work that doesn't have meaning. We'd rather solve one hard and meaningful problem well than manage a portfolio of mediocre ones.