When Process Replaces Progress: How Technology Providers Undermine Productivity from the Inside

Editor’s Note: Throughout 2025, ComplexDiscovery staff covered a comprehensive circuit of industry-defining events, gathering insights from SXSWEDU in Austin, Latitude59 in Estonia, the Dublin Tech Summit, and LegalTechTalk in London. This tour continued through the Tallinn Digital Summit and culminated in the dual-use defense focus of BORDERLAND at SLUSH 2025 in Helsinki. Beyond these summits, our team listened and learned from regional acceleration models, such as the Innovation Triangle in Texas, and from strategic discussions hosted by The LegalTech Fund (TLTF).

Across this diverse landscape—ranging from educational technology to national defense—a recurring theme emerged. It was an observation sometimes readily apparent in formal pitches, but even more vividly articulated in informal sidebars and networking sessions: the industry is wrestling with the challenge of process over productivity. While the external narrative celebrates speed and AI integration, the internal reality for many is one of sticky complexity. This article synthesizes those observations, coupled with career experience in product management and product development, to explore why so many organizations—from defense contractors to software vendors—are constrained by the very frameworks meant to support them.

Industry News – Technology Beat

When Process Replaces Progress: How Technology Providers Undermine Productivity from the Inside

ComplexDiscovery Staff

A distinct shift occurs when a professional transitions from industry innovation summits to the daily reality of corporate execution. Amidst founders and visionaries, conversations revolve around raw creation, the deployment of domain-specific AI, and the tangible restructuring of industries. Yet for many professionals returning to established technology firms—whether in legal services, defense manufacturing, or SaaS platforms—that momentum often dissipates the moment they log in to their corporate dashboards.

Behind the workflows and operational rituals that define modern technology and professional services, a persistent operational challenge has taken hold. Productivity is not always being constrained by market pressure or technical limits, but by an internal fixation on process rather than outcomes. While the external narrative promises agility and speed, the internal reality for many mature firms is a steady cadence of governance that often creates friction rather than flow.

The Internal Mismatch: Trifurcation Failed

Technology companies have never been busier, yet many are producing less of what customers actually value. From legal tech vendors to defense systems integrators, organizations continue to invest heavily in frameworks designed to impose order at scale. Agile ceremonies, internal governance reviews, operating models, and layered approvals promise predictability. In practice, many of these structures now operate independently of the results they were meant to enable.

This disconnect is best understood through the lens of “trifurcation,” a concept highlighted in recent industry discussions during the TLTF Summit. The theory suggests that the market is systematically segmenting work into three distinct buckets: bespoke, high-value consulting; mid-tier operational tasks; and routine, automated commodities. A practical internal corollary is tiered governance: high-novelty, high-risk work warrants rigorous gates; repeatable operational work benefits from standardized controls; and low-risk, routine work should default to automation, monitoring, and fast approvals.

The challenge facing providers today stems from a failure to mirror this separation internally. Instead of “trifurcating” their own operations, they apply high-touch, bespoke governance to every layer of delivery. This misalignment manifests differently across sectors, yet the result is consistently slower execution. In common scenarios, a legal technology firm may find that a minor software update—carrying negligible risk—remains stalled for weeks because it must pass the same quarterly governance board designed for a major platform overhaul. Similarly, in managed services, dashboards might glow green as teams meet strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for initial response times, masking the reality that repeat incidents of the same issue continue to rise. The pattern repeats in the defense and aerospace sectors, where test environments may require the same rigorous approval gates as production deployments, effectively stalling research and development cycles before they can even begin.

The High Cost of Control

Executives increasingly confront a paradox where product roadmaps slip despite full teams, and service delivery slows even as headcount grows. Customers report friction while internal metrics suggest progress. McKinsey’s analysis of a McKinsey Global Survey (fielded March 29–April 8, 2022) found that nearly half of middle managers’ time is devoted to non-managerial work, including roughly one full day each week on administrative tasks, with additional time consumed by individual-contributor work. When a provider applies the same heavy approval gates to a low-risk maintenance task as it does to a mission-critical deployment, it hasn’t just added safety; it has created an embedded inefficiency.

As firms mature, procedural layers tend to accumulate. Each new initiative introduces reporting requirements, and each past failure spawns an approval gate. Multiple studies suggest the managerial class has expanded materially in recent decades, alongside changing expectations that managers serve as cross-functional coordinators—an evolution that can increase coordination load if decision rights and operating design are not recalibrated. Over time, the organization becomes optimized to demonstrate activity instead of delivering results. Work slows not because teams lack skill, but because decision paths lengthen.

A defining symptom of this breakdown is middle-management expansion untethered from operational experience. As companies scale, management layers often grow faster than delivery capacity. Many managers are asked to oversee domains—engineering, platform operations, or service delivery—that they have never personally performed. Without firsthand familiarity, leadership behavior shifts toward imitation. This emulation creates administrative routines where meetings, dashboards, and approvals multiply, signaling control rather than producing results.

Teams adapt quickly to this environment. Engineers optimize for internal reviews rather than product quality, while service teams prioritize ticket closure over durable resolution. Platform groups focus on roadmap optics rather than adoption outcomes. Bain & Company’s research on ‘organizational drag’ indicates that the average company loses more than 20% of its productive capacity—more than a day each week—to structures and processes that consume time and impede execution. The organization appears orderly and productive while velocity and clarity steadily erode.

Innovation at the Edge

Contrast this with the emerging accelerator models seen in the aerospace and defense sectors, such as those fostered by the Innovation Triangle in Texas—a collaboration between Texas A&M University, Plug and Play Tech Center, and the Greater Brazos Partnership. There, the emphasis shifts from governance choreography to deployment velocity. At the program’s September 2025 showcase, university leadership emphasized that the focus extends beyond incubation and acceleration to how technologies actually reach operational use. This orientation suggests a practical application of the trifurcation principle: lighter-touch oversight during experimentation, with rigor reserved for operational deployment. The model demonstrates that speed and safety need not be mutually exclusive; reducing latency in the testing phase often improves the quality of the feedback loop.

Sticky Complexity in the Age of AI

Technology itself does not resolve this problem. Automation and AI amplify whatever systems already exist. When applied to outcome-aligned workflows—like initiatives to streamline procurement or automate low-risk validations—they reduce burden and sharpen focus. When layered onto process-heavy environments, they accelerate inefficiency and scale confusion. Over time, excessive procedural layering that is not tied to outcomes can create “sticky complexity” that persists long after its original justification has faded.

Some providers are beginning to recalibrate by redefining how success is measured. Rather than tracking adherence to procedures, they focus on time-to-customer value, reduction in repeat failures, depth of adoption, and delivery predictability. These measures reconnect work to purpose. Leaders finding themselves in this trap might start by auditing their standing meetings and recurring reports, asking simply which ones directly support a customer outcome. Structural adjustments often follow, where decision authority moves closer to the work, management layers flatten, and leaders with direct operational experience are empowered to remove friction rather than add controls.

Escaping the Trap

The most effective organizations treat process as infrastructure rather than identity. Structure exists to support execution, not replace it. Teams are trusted to apply judgment within clear goals, and leadership attention shifts from supervising activity to enabling outcomes.

As competitive pressure intensifies and customers grow less tolerant of friction, technology providers face a choice. They can continue investing in activities that look productive, or they can redesign work so that effort reliably produces value. The question is no longer whether process is necessary, but whether an organization can distinguish between the work that requires it and the work that is stifled by it.

Postscript: From Framework to Action

The trifurcation model is only useful if it escapes the slide deck. Too often, frameworks become another layer of process—discussed in off-sites, documented in wikis, and never applied to the work that actually ships. The pattern is familiar: a team recognizes the problem, adopts a new vocabulary, and then returns to the same approval queues, the same standing meetings, the same dashboards that measure motion instead of progress.

This is where imitation takes hold. Leaders who have never personally shipped a product, resolved an outage, or closed a customer implementation default to replicating what they’ve seen others do. They add reviews because other teams have reviews. They require sign-offs because sign-offs signal diligence. The result is governance that performs control rather than producing outcomes. The organization grows more elaborate while the work grows slower.

Breaking this cycle requires action, not analysis. The trifurcation insight is simple: not all work carries the same risk, and not all work deserves the same oversight. A security-critical architecture change is not the same as a routine configuration update. A novel product launch is not the same as a standard maintenance release. Treating each of them identically does not create safety; it creates delay—and delay has its own costs. As the article notes, customers report friction while internal metrics suggest progress. That gap is where trust erodes.

The leaders who escape the trap are those willing to make a decision before the framework is perfect. They pick one workflow—often the one that generates the most complaints—and ask a direct question: which of these steps exists because of genuine risk, and which exists because no one has bothered to remove them? They run a pilot, not a committee. They measure cycle time, not activity. And when the pilot works, they expand it—without waiting for enterprise-wide alignment.

This approach is not reckless. It is the recognition that judgment, applied by people with operational experience, is faster and often safer than process, administered by people imitating what they believe oversight should look like. The most effective technology leaders treat governance as a tool, not an identity. They know that the goal is not to demonstrate control but to deliver value—and that every unnecessary gate is a tax on the people doing the actual work.

The question is not whether your organization has the right framework. The question is whether anyone is willing to act on it. Pick one approval that slows commodity work. Remove it for 30 days. Measure what happens. That single experiment will reveal more about your organization’s relationship to process than any audit or assessment.

Trifurcation is not a theory to be studied. It is a filter to be applied—starting with the next decision you make.

News Sources

• Stop Wasting Your Most Precious Resource: Middle Managers (McKinsey & Company)
• Outcomes Over Outputs: Why Productivity Is No Longer the Metric That Matters Most (Deloitte)
• Time, Talent, Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s Productive Power (Bain & Company)
• Streamlining Spans and Layers (Bain & Company)
• Innovation Triangle Showcases First Aerospace and Defense Accelerator Cohort with a Vision for the Frontier (ComplexDiscovery)
• How Finland is Reshaping Defense: BORDERLAND at Slush 2025 (ComplexDiscovery)

Assisted by GAI and LLM Technologies

Additional Reading

• Lessons From Slush 2025: How Harvey Is Scaling Domain-Specific AI For Legal And Beyond
• Evolving Product Lifecycle Management: The Expanding Role of Product Managers and Democratized Prototyping in Legal Technology

Source: ComplexDiscovery OÜ