I've been drawing a map

Not a framework. Not a maturity model. A map of the hazards you hit when you scale. The inflection points that break your stride when you least expect them.

Brooks's Law Ravine. The Dunbar Wall. The Fens of Distrust. The Legacy Monolith.

I've crossed many of them. Made mistakes in some. Fixed a few. Helped others navigate terrain I'd already walked.

And I keep refining what I'm thinking about. The biggest rocks I've tripped over, the places where the ground goes soft, the walls that look climbable until you're halfway up.

But here's the thing:

Like all great quests, nobody just hands you the whole map. You get little segments one by one.

And as I write this now, I realise that piecing together this map is perhaps what I've been trying to do my entire career.

Each scale-up I've worked with. Each conversation. Each random encounter with a peer. Another fragment.

So I'm putting this out deliberately unfinished. Well, hardly started.

The value isn't in me handing you a perfect chart. It's in naming the things and collecting the stories. The rocks you might trip over. The bogs that look like solid ground. You can't swerve a hazard you can't name.

What's missing from this map? Don't be shy. Which have you swerved? (Well done, by the way.) Are you willing to tell us a story? And where's the dragons?