I got what the team had built in front of the people who'd already said they wanted a solution. The first thing they told us was that it was a nice concept, but it had to work with the systems they already used.

Those systems were mostly HubSpot and Salesforce. Salesforce is notoriously hard to build for, because every company sets it up differently. HubSpot is much more consistent, so I suggested we strip everything back and get a solid HubSpot integration working first, then build Syncrasy's value on top of it. That one decision changed who we could talk to, who we could sell to, and what the team worked on each day.

I also changed how the team worked. These were senior engineers who were perfectly capable of solving problems, but they'd been handed tasks without much clarity. We stopped writing tickets that spelled out the solution. Instead, we started from the problem, talked it through together, and logged rough solution ideas in Linear. Everyone got to shape the answer, and the whole project ran more smoothly as a result.

In one workshop, we mapped the entire infrastructure from start to finish: what each part does, how the parts connect, and what everything costs. Both engineers had worked at big tech companies and had never done that exercise before. It took a couple of hours and gave everyone, including an investor, a shared picture of the whole system.