Organizations and processes incur friction slowly. Friction is set by what we decide to let slide when it comes to maintaining best practices. Friction is set by the code we ship without regard for how it will scale or be maintained later. Friction is doing things because that’s how we’ve always done them. It’s one seemingly harmless change after the other, but the end result is a system of people and code that is incredibly hard to change.

If I had to summarize what I’ve talked about so far, friction is an inevitable outcome of company growth, which we can’t control. However, friction is often made worse by the normalization of deviance, which we can control.