By Jacob Sunkel · Founder & Lead Strategist, PeaceMaker Labs
June 16, 2026 · 8 min read
A Franken-tech stack is not “having too many apps.” It is having too many apps that do not agree on reality. CRM says one thing. Spreadsheet says another. The warehouse system says a third. People invent workarounds because the official path is slower than a side channel.
Telltale signs
- Double data entry is normal, not an exception.
- Licenses renew for tools half the team abandoned six months ago.
- Every department has a “shadow system” in Sheets or Notion.
- IT or a vendor owns the tools; nobody owns adoption.
- New software gets bought to fix process problems that were never designed.
I have watched companies spend five figures a year on platforms their frontline quietly refused. Leadership saw dashboards. Operators saw friction. That gap is where margin goes to die.
How we approach it
We are not a shop that recommends a new suite every quarter. We sit in the messy middle—APIs and capacity planning, not slide decks about “digital transformation.” A SPOT Check usually surfaces whether the issue is Strategy (wrong goals for the stack), People (no owners), Operations (broken handoffs), or Technology (integrations and automation that never finished).
Sometimes the fix is integrating what you already own. Sometimes it is killing a tool. Sometimes it is a thin custom layer so humans stop copying fields between systems. The test is simple: will the people doing the work use it next Tuesday without being nagged?
“If the frontline will not use it, we do not build it. Simple systems win.”
If your stack feels like it grew without a plan, that is common for companies that scaled past their first tools. It is fixable. Start with an honest inventory of what is actually used—then book a Peace Talk if you want a second set of eyes on what to keep, cut, or connect.