Packed S-Bahn. Summer maintenance on the busiest rail line in northern Germany.
If you’re from the true north, you already know which line I mean.
The trains were never the constraint.
The track is.
And the maintenance was always going to come due. It just came due all at once, in July, with everyone standing.
Sometimes, we are doing the same thing in tech.
With AI, delivery is no longer the primary bottleneck. The question has shifted from “Can we build it?” to “Can the organisation actually adopt it?”
We measure technical debt religiously. Almost nobody measures adoption debt — the gap between what we’ve built and what the organisation has truly absorbed.
The next competitive advantage won’t come from building faster.