Stop treating “two-way doors” like they stay open forever.
I often hear leadership teams justify a technology or process choice by saying, “It’s a reversible decision. If it doesn’t work, we’ll just swap it out next quarter.”
But here is the reality of the pre-sales or post-sales lifecycle: Reversibility isn’t a static property.
The “cost to exit” isn’t just about rewriting code. It’s the compounding debt of:
- Workflow Integration: Every custom automation is a nail in the doorframe.
- Data Gravity: Moving years of customer sentiment and lifecycle data isn’t a “weekend project.”
- Team Habituation: The mental overhead of retraining a global Support or Account team is often higher than the licensing fee itself.
If you aren’t actively paying to maintain that door’s optionality (through abstraction layers or deliberate usage limits), you are effectively letting the option expire.
Sometimes, that’s the right move. Choosing a “one-way door” and going all-in on a platform can give your team the speed they need to scale. But we must stop pretending that every “two-way door” stays unlocked by magic.
Are you holding open doors that should have been shut long ago?
#SalesEngineering
Original Post – https://fffej.substack.com/p/two-way-doors-sometimes-lock-behind
