Every small organization has gaps. Maybe you have an engineering lead but no dedicated DevOps team. Maybe your product manager is stretched thin and the tech lead is absorbing PM responsibilities. Maybe a designer role is emerging, but nobody owns it yet.

These gaps often emerge in specific domains. Growing organizations typically need four types of engineering leadership, and early-stage teams almost never have all of them covered. This is normal. The question is: how do you respond?

Teams may make the mistake of dumping the entire burden on one person. They identify the gap, find whoever is closest to it, and expect that person to absorb all the additional work. This breaks people.

There's a better approach I call "shifting left."

Every engineering blog paints a picture of clean microservices, continuous deployment, and comprehensive observability. I've been in this industry for over a decade, and I've never experienced this ideal state across the board. I've seen glimmers. Teams that nail one dimension. But never everything at once.

That gap between the ideal and reality is what I call working in the mud.