Connect the Shade

This morning I found the cherry tree stripped bare on one side. Deer, sometime overnight, working through the tender new growth with the calm efficiency of animals who know you're asleep. I've gardened in Colorado long enough to expect this. You plant, you protect, you plan — and then reality wanders in on four legs and reminds you who's actually in charge.

I've been at this for years now, gardening through drought that keeps getting worse. The Colorado River is running low, the winters keep coming up dry, and the sun here does not forgive. Full afternoon exposure will cook a plant that would thrive almost anywhere else. For a long time that felt like a problem I couldn't solve. The heat was the heat. The drought was the drought. What was I supposed to do, argue with the sky?

Then I noticed something. Even the smallest patch of shade changed everything. A plant tucked behind a fence post, a seedling sheltered by a taller neighbor, a bed that caught the shadow of the house in the worst part of the day — these survived when their neighbors scorched. Not because the conditions were good. Because the conditions were slightly less brutal in that one spot.

So I changed my approach. Instead of fighting the whole yard, I started placing things on purpose. A shrub here to block the harsh afternoon sun from the south. A structure there to soften the late-day glare coming in hard from the west. One protected spot made the next one easier. A taller plant gave shelter to a smaller one, which held a little moisture, which fed the soil, which supported something else. Over the years it all connected into a tapestry of little microclimates — small survivable ecosystems stitched together into something that could take the heat.

I call this connecting the shade. And the longer I do it, the more I'm convinced it's how you fix a struggling product too.

Stressed Products Are Drought Gardens

Most product advice is written for good weather. It assumes enough time, enough budget, clean systems, patient leadership, and users who haven't already been worn down. That's not the climate most teams actually work in.

The real climate is harsh. Products carry years of accumulated decisions, and that accumulation creates heat. Every shortcut, every "we'll fix it later," every feature bolted on under deadline pressure raises the temperature until the whole thing feels exposed and fragile. Teams standing in that heat tend to do one of two things: they either freeze, or they try to fix everything at once. Both fail for the same reason. You cannot argue with the sky.

The heat has a name. Two names, actually.

Two Kinds of Debt

Tech debt is the accumulated cost of choosing short-term implementation speed over long-term system health. It's not just old code. It's the growing tax a team pays because the underlying structure no longer supports the work being asked of it — brittle dependencies, fragile releases, slow delivery, and the same problems resurfacing after you thought they were solved.

UX debt is the accumulated cost of choosing short-term delivery over long-term clarity, usability, and trust. It shows up as confusing flows, inconsistent patterns, hidden logic, and journeys people have to survive rather than understand. Plenty of organizations grasp tech debt as a concept. They badly underestimate UX debt, even though users feel it the instant they touch the product.

Here's the part that matters most. These two feed each other. Tech debt exhausts the team, draining the energy needed to make thoughtful design choices. UX debt exhausts the user, generating the support tickets and workarounds that keep the team buried. Together they create a genuinely harsh environment — the product equivalent of full afternoon sun in a drought. Nothing new grows well there for long.

And standing in that heat, teams keep reaching for the same doomed move: fix it all. Rebuild the platform. Redesign the whole thing. Heal the entire system in one heroic push. It almost never works, because you cannot lower the temperature of the whole yard at once.

Find the First Patch of Shade

So you do what a drought gardener does. You find the one spot where relief is possible, and you start there.

In a struggling product, that means finding the smallest intervention that creates real relief — for users, for the team, or ideally both. Maybe it's the one broken flow that generates half your support load. Maybe it's the fragile service that breaks every deploy. You don't pick it because it's the biggest problem. You pick it because fixing it makes the next fix easier.

That's the whole strategy, and it's why this is not the same as "just make small improvements." Random incremental fixes scatter your energy across the yard. Connecting the shade is deliberate. It's environmental design. You place each improvement so its benefit extends to what sits beside it.

One well-chosen fix can lower support burden, which frees the team, which builds confidence, which makes the next cleanup possible, which stabilizes a workflow, which earns back a little user trust. Shade isn't an isolated comfort. It changes what becomes possible nearby. Sequence these moves well and disconnected repairs start knitting into a healthier system — the same way a shrub and a fence post and a taller plant eventually become a microclimate.

Stop Building in the Hottest Part of the Yard

This is where Escape the Build Trap earns its place on the shelf. Melissa Perri's argument is that shipping more is not the same as creating value — that teams get trapped measuring output when they should be building outcomes.

Connecting the shade extends that logic into distressed conditions. When a product is already overheated by debt, the trap gets more tempting, not less. Attention flows to the flashiest, most visible work — the new feature, the splashy redesign — which is almost always the hottest, most exposed part of the yard. So teams keep planting in full sun because that's where everyone's looking, and then wonder why nothing survives.

The better question isn't "What do we build next?" It's "Where can we create relief?" What small move makes the adjacent work easier? What one fix reduces stress on both the user and the team? Where does a single good decision open room for three more? That's not a retreat from ambition. It's ambition aimed at the conditions that actually let value grow.

The Deer Always Win Something

Here's what keeps this honest, and it's the part I was reminded of this morning while looking at a half-eaten cherry tree.

The garden is never finished. Neither is the product. You can connect all the shade you want and reality will still get a vote — a deer overnight, an outage, a competitor, a user doing something no one imagined. There is no version of this work where you protect everything and win permanently. Anyone selling that is selling hype.

That's not a reason to give up. It's a reason to stop waiting for perfect. The teams that thrive under debt aren't the ones who eliminated it. They're the ones who created enough connected relief that they could keep growing anyway, deer and drought and all.

The whole product may never be perfect, just like the garden never is. The job is not to eliminate every harsh condition. The job is to connect enough shade that better things can grow anyway.