Messy Middle #011: Buying Software Because Competitors Did It

Messy Middle Comics #011 — Operational Chaos & Accountability

We don’t have a use case yet but the competitor mentioned it in their investor deck so now it’s urgent.

The competitor bought it. The board asked about it. The CEO mentioned it in all-hands. Now we need it by Friday. Nobody’s asked what it does.

This is Fear-Of-Missing-Out as procurement strategy. The buying decision wasn’t ‘this solves a problem we have.’ It was ‘they have it, so we need it, so find a problem it solves.’

The pattern: buy tool, announce tool, assign tool to someone who didn’t ask for it, wait six months, discover nobody uses it, keep paying because cancelling means admitting the decision was wrong.

The uncomfortable truth: most AI tool purchases are FOMO purchases. And FOMO purchases don’t solve problems — they create new ones while generating impressive-looking dashboards about how much you’re ‘leveraging AI.’

The alternative: start with the workflow, not the tool. What does your team actually need to produce? What’s the bottleneck? Buy the thing that removes the bottleneck. Ignore everything else.

Messy Middle Comics — A gimmefy Production.