How the Tide Is Made

Early in my career, a product manager gave me a metaphor that stuck: raise the waterline. We were debating whether to chase a handful of niche features for a few loud customers or invest in quieter work that would make the product better for everyone. Her instinct leaned toward the latter. Don’t sprint from one squeaky wheel to the next. Make the system sturdier, even if some people have to wait.

The phrase borrows from the old saying about rising tides. But this wasn’t about waiting for one. It was about building it.

I loved the idea immediately, which should have been my first warning.

Raising the waterline means fixing root causes instead of symptoms. It means noticing that a certain kind of deal keeps jamming up legal and deciding to change the workflow rather than throwing more hands at it. It means investing in rituals that lift the whole team, even when they feel optional. It means solving problems once instead of heroically solving them every quarter.

The progress is invisible for a long time. You’re training for a marathon while everyone else runs sprints and posts their times. Months pass before you notice you’re in better shape. Years, maybe.

I'm a distance runner. Of course this was going to appeal to me.

But here’s what I’ve started to wonder: is this actually wisdom, or is it a sophisticated excuse?

When you tell yourself you’re raising the waterline, you get to ignore the customers banging on the door. You get to build what feels architecturally correct instead of what someone is asking for right now. The philosophy sounds rigorous, but it can also be a way of never being wrong in the present because the payoff is always deferred to some future state.

I’ve seen teams patiently invest in infrastructure and wake up stronger for it. Fewer fires. Clearer handoffs. Work that compounds instead of unraveling.

I’ve also seen teams disappear into infrastructure while the market moved on without them. Perfect workflows for problems no one was paying to have solved.

The honest answer is that I still don’t know when “raise the waterline” is discipline and when it’s avoidance. The metaphor is seductive precisely because it lets you feel principled while ignoring urgent noise.

Sometimes the urgent noise is just noise.

Sometimes it’s the only signal that matters.