For a team to function well, everyone on it needs to have a shared agenda. For a team member to be happy, they need to feel like the team agenda is somewhat aligned with their own personal agenda. For a team to be happy, they need to feel like no individual is prioritising their personal agenda over the team agenda.

The more dependencies something has, the harder it is to safely make decisions about it, change it, or even just understand it.

Dependencies are like Jenga blocks. The higher they’re stacked, the more gingerly you have to approach them. One wrong move and everything comes crashing down.

The best way to build momentum is by reducing dependencies. Breaking big problems down into smaller, simpler, more independent tasks to solve.

Complexity is often a by-product of unmanaged dependencies.