Student onboarding at SANS felt like playing Whac-A-Mole — fix one issue, and two more would pop up somewhere else. Every new student meant a scramble: someone in ops would flip a bit here, someone else would provision a license there, and inevitably, something would get missed. It was chaos disguised as process.

So I did what I always do: I started talking to everyone — ops, engineering, support. I mapped every system, every handoff, every "just email so-and-so" workaround onto a single, sprawling diagram. Shipping, licensing, provisioning, evaluations — all of it. Seeing it all at once was both overwhelming and clarifying. Suddenly, the bottlenecks weren’t rumors — they were right there in black and white. For example, we found that manual spreadsheets were the linchpins for shipping and licensing, and if they broke, student enablement would grind to a halt.

Sharing that big-picture map with the teams was a vulnerable moment. But that diagram became our shared language. It let us prioritize, iterate, and — over time — turn Whac-A-Mole into a real system.

Here’s my advice: before writing a single line of code, sketch your end-to-end workflow to spotlight hidden bottlenecks. You can’t fix what you can’t see.