Capacity Planning Is Boring. Until It Isn't.

I spent five hours bolting an extended fuel tank onto my Sea-Doo. It's the most boring work I've done this month. I'd argue it's the most important.

Not glamorous. Pull the old tank, route the new lines, clamp everything down, double-check every fitting, bleed the system. Tedious, fiddly work, the kind where one loose connection ruins your whole day.

When I finished, I just stood there looking at it. It's not complicated. It's just mine. I did every bolt. I know exactly what's holding and what's questionable, because I touched all of it.

That's the part of shop work that never gets old. No ambiguity. The clamp is tight or it isn't. The line seats or it doesn't. After months of leading teams and shipping software, where the work is invisible and the results show up months later, five hours of concrete, verifiable work feels like a reset.

But here's the honest part: tomorrow I take it offshore, and I hope it works. Not "I know it works." I hope. No amount of care removes the first real test. You build it, you check it, you trust it — and then the ocean decides. That's true of deploys, too.

The thing about the tank, though, is that it was never about fuel. It's about range. More distance between me and the dock. More margin when the weather turns. More options when I have to make a call.

That's a decent summary of what I try to build everywhere else. Margin. Options. The ability to go further and still make it home.

Capacity planning is the same story, and it gets the same treatment in most organizations: it's the boring line item, the first thing cut when the roadmap gets tight. Nobody demos headroom. Nobody gets promoted for surge capacity. So we run our systems with exactly enough — until the spike hits, the campaign lands, the customer doubles down, and the thing that was fine yesterday is the thing that's down today.

The extended tank didn't change how the Sea-Doo rides. It changed what I can attempt. That's what capacity buys you in systems, too: not speed, not features, but the freedom to make the call that needs making when conditions change.

Margin is the feature. The tank is just how you buy it. And like most infrastructure, it only looks like wasted money until the day it's the entire difference between making it home and not.

Think this argument fits your event? Tell me about the room — the calendar is selective.