Hello Reader—
One Monday, I got the call every CTO dreads.
“Steve, our 10X engineer just quit. The platform is completely down. We can’t deploy anything. The board is asking if we should shut down the entire engineering division.”
Three years. £10M invested. One person held it all together.
When he left, everything collapsed in 72 hours.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Your platform heroes aren’t saving you. They’re slowly killing your business.
THE £500K HERO TAX
After analysing 50+ platform failures, I discovered something shocking:
Every “hero-dependent” platform costs 5-10x more than it should.
The math is brutal:
- Hero salary premium: +£40K/year
- Team productivity loss: -30% (others stop learning)
- Bus factor insurance: Priceless until they leave
- Emergency replacement cost: £250K+ (usually need 3 people)
- Downtime during transition: £2M+ in lost revenue
That financial services client from Monday? Their hero’s departure cost them:
- 3 days of complete platform downtime
- £2.3M in lost transactions
- £45K in emergency contractors
- 6 months to rebuild institutional knowledge
The real kicker? Their “complex” platform was just Kubernetes with custom wrappers that only one person understood.
THE HERO DETECTION TEST™
Is your platform hero-dependent? Count these red flags:
✓ One person gets called for every production issue
✓ “Ask [Name]” appears in your documentation
✓ That person hasn’t taken a real vacation in 2+ years
✓ New team members need weeks of “tribal knowledge” transfer
✓ Your deployment process requires specific people to be online
Score 3+? You’re one resignation away from disaster.
SPEAKING OF PLATFORM DISASTERS… I just co-authored an ebook with Portainer’s CEO Neil Cresswell that exposes the brutal reality behind Kubernetes adoption failures.
After speaking to thousands of companies struggling with K8s transformations, we discovered something shocking: 73% fail not because of technical complexity, but because of hero dependency and organizational blindness.
The same patterns that create platform heroes also destroy Kubernetes projects:
- One person becomes the “K8s expert”
- Complex architectures only they understand
- “Conference-driven platform design” that impresses nobody but confuses everyone
[Download: “Why Kubernetes Projects Really Fail” →]
Perfect timing if you’re planning K8s adoption or recovering from a stalled migration.
THE 4-WEEK HERO DETOX PROGRAM
Here’s exactly how to save your platform (and your sanity):
Week 1: The Knowledge Audit
- List everything only one person knows
- Rank by business criticality
- Start documenting the #1 item
Week 2: Force the Rotation
- Every critical task needs 2+ people who can do it
- No exceptions, no “but they’re faster” excuses
Week 3: The Documentation Sprint
- If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist
- Record every hero action for one week
- Turn tribal knowledge into runbooks
Week 4: The Vacation Test
- Hero takes 3 days off (no calls, no Slack)
- Let small things break
- Document what failed and why
Result? That retail client went from 80% hero-dependent to 70% documented knowledge in 4 weeks. Their AWS costs dropped £33K/month when they simplified the “genius” architecture.
THIS WEEK’S REALITY CHECK
From your responses, 73% of you have a platform hero problem.
The pattern? Teams scoring highest on my Reality Check had one thing in common: Any team member could explain the platform in under 5 minutes.
Those with hero dependency? Their onboarding docs averaged 47 pages of “ask Steve when you get stuck.”
The brutal truth: Complexity isn’t sophistication. It’s fear disguised as engineering.
YOUR ESCAPE PLAN: START TODAY
Pick ONE action for this week:
- Shadow your hero for one day - Document everything they touch
- Create a runbook for one critical process - Test it with someone who’s never done it
- Implement one automation - Replace one manual hero action
- Force-rotate one responsibility - Hero can advise but not execute
- Celebrate boring success - Praise the non-heroic work that just… works
READER SUCCESS: THE £2M HERO RECOVERY
“Steve, we read Issue #006 as a team. Our ‘hero’ almost cried with relief - he thought we wanted him chained to his desk forever. We started rotations Monday. Three weeks later, he took his first real vacation in 3 years. The platform didn’t just survive - it thrived. We discovered his ‘critical’ custom deployment tool was doing what GitHub Actions could do for free. Deleted it. Saved £2M annually.”
WHAT’S COMING NEXT WEEK
Issue #008: “The Platform Metrics That Actually Predict Success”
- Why CPU usage is vanity (and what matters instead)
- The 5 numbers that predict platform health
- Building dashboards developers actually use
Plus: Live results from this week’s Hero Dependency Assessments!
Build platforms, not dependencies.
Steve
P.S. If you’re the hero reading this: It’s not your fault, but it IS your responsibility to stop being one. Your platform, your team, and your sanity depend on it.
P.P.S. That £10M platform that collapsed? We rebuilt it in 6 weeks using boring technology. No heroes required. Deploy time went from 45 minutes to 3. I’ll show you exactly how in next month’s masterclass.
📅 AUGUST MASTERCLASS: Building Hero-Free Platforms
Date: Tuesday 19th August, 2pm UK
Topic: The Boring Technology Revolution Continues
Focus: Sustainable teams + Simple systems
[Reserve Your Free Spot - Only 5 Remaining →]