The Strategic Case for “Use What Works”: Why Smart Tech Leaders Stop Reinventing the Wheel

A peculiar kind of pride runs through the technology industry. Many leaders believe their problems are unique, their scale unprecedented, their requirements so specific that only a custom-built solution will do.

This belief is also one of the most expensive mistakes your organization can make.

The Hidden Cost of “Building It Ourselves”

Every custom solution your team builds is a solution your team must maintain. Forever. Or at least until someone finally rips it out, usually years after the original developer has moved on, leaving behind a legacy that no one fully understands and everyone is afraid to touch.

If you have spent any time in technology leadership, you have inherited one of these systems. You know the feeling: the documentation is sparse, the original author is unreachable, and the thing is somehow load-bearing for your entire operation.

Ask yourself honestly: how much of your engineering budget goes toward maintaining problems that someone else has already solved?

The “Use What Works” Philosophy

The Use What Works vision offers a direct principle: organizations should generally use existing, proven, and sustainable solutions to common problems rather than developing, maintaining, and running their own.

This philosophy emerges from recognizing where your organization’s differentiation actually lies.

Your authentication system is probably not your competitive advantage. Neither is your deployment pipeline, your logging setup, or your database management tooling. These are solved problems. Teams whose entire focus is solving them have solved them well.

Five Reasons This Matters for Your Business

1. Your Best Engineers Should Be Building Your Product

Every hour a talented developer spends building a custom caching layer is an hour they are not spending on the features that differentiate your product in the market. Proven solutions let your team focus on value creation rather than infrastructure reinvention.

2. Turnover Is Inevitable. Plan for It.

People leave. When they do, who maintains the custom solution they built? If documented at all, it reflects their style, their assumptions, their understanding. Established technologies come with community knowledge, third-party documentation, and a hiring pool of people who already know how they work.

3. Battle-Tested Beats Theoretically Elegant

Linus’s Law observes: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Software deployed across thousands of organizations, at every conceivable scale, has encountered and resolved problems your custom solution has not even discovered yet. You benefit from the collected experience of an entire community.

4. Predictability Reduces Risk

Proven solutions come with documentation, case studies, and communities. When something breaks at 2 AM, there is likely a Stack Overflow thread, a support agreement, or a consultant who has seen it before. Your custom solution has none of these things. Just an on-call engineer reading code they did not write.

5. AI Assistance Works Better with Established Tools

If your teams are using AI coding assistants, those tools perform dramatically better with well-documented, widely used technologies. The models have seen thousands of examples of proper implementation. They have not seen your custom internal tools.

The Sustainability Argument

A broader consideration exists here too. Maintaining quality software costs money. When organizations cluster around proven solutions, the cost of that maintenance is distributed across everyone who benefits. This creates sustainable systems where even smaller organizations can access enterprise-grade infrastructure.

The alternative, where everyone builds their own, fragments effort, duplicates cost, and delivers worse outcomes for everyone.

When Custom Makes Sense

This is not absolutism. Legitimate cases exist for building custom solutions: when your requirements genuinely are unique, when the existing options do not meet your needs, or when the problem space is so central to your business that you need complete control.

But those cases are rarer than most technology organizations believe. The only honest question worth asking: should we build this ourselves?

The Bottom Line

Stop waste. Reduce risk. Focus your engineering talent on the problems that actually differentiate your business.

Use what works.

Use What Works is an open initiative encouraging organizations to embrace proven, sustainable solutions. Learn more about what this means for business leaders on our homepage: https://usewhatworks.org/.

Tags: business of software