Sprawl: It made sense at the time
When my wife and I were house-hunting a few years ago, we saw a lot of places with what I’d call... creative floorplans.
A bedroom you could only reach by walking through another bedroom.
A laundry closet in the bedroom.
A master bathroom that opened directly into the kitchen.
You could tell these homes had been added onto over time. And I'm sure none of these homeowners actually set out to design a confusing house.
A project here, a tweak there. Each change solved a real need in the moment. But over time, the structure started to wander.
Your CRM might feel a little like that.
An event-related custom field added directly to all contacts.
A one-off profile for a past event that’s now also being used for contributions.
A new tag when no one remembered the old one.
Mailing-list groups that overlap in confusing ways.
It's not as if it were designed wrong. It just wasn’t designed all at once.
And maybe for the people who made those changes, it still feels fine — as I'm sure it did for the folks who were (finally) selling those houses.
But if you’ve inherited the system — or even just come back to something you configured a year ago — you’ve probably felt the strain.
Here’s the thing:
The more things get patched up incrementally, the harder it becomes to understand, use, and trust the system day-to-day.
And if someone new ever has to take it over? That’s even harder.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about why cleanup is so tricky — and why most teams put it off as long as they can.
All the best,
A.