Sauerkraut Is Not a Strategy

A Complexity Tale in Four Courses

When simple dreams get buried under the complexity of consultants and chaos.

It started with a dream. My dream. My reward for a lifetime of product management battles, burndowns, and backlog brawls.

A simple, ubiquitous Dino Dogs umbrella cart by the beach.
One cart. One bun. One kosher all-beef hot dog.

No stand-ups. No quarterly planning.
No Jira tickets labeled "Epic: Mustard Dispenser Optimization."

Just sunshine, sand, and the simple joy of slinging hot dogs to hungry surfers and sleepy detectorists.

That was the dream.
That was the life.

Where the dream began: one cart, one beach, one simple joy.

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Then — maybe it was the burrito I ate before bed, maybe it was a cursed TED Talk clip autoplaying in the background — the dream twisted.

Consultants showed up.

Not one, not two — a whole scrum of them.

And they started whispering:

"That dinky cart? You're thinking too small."
"You need to scale!"
"You need a food truck... no, a fleet!"
"You need a Dino Dogs loyalty app powered by AI & blockchain!"
"You need vegan sushi dogs to capture adjacent beachhead markets!"
"You need a Center of Condiment Excellence!"

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At first, I tried to laugh it off.
I tried to go back to grilling dogs.

But the whispers grew louder.
And before I knew it...

I wasn’t running a cart.
I wasn’t living the dream.

I was stuck inside a Scaled Agile Framework® for Food Service Delivery (SAF-FSD®).

There were PI Planning sessions for bun rotation strategies.
Agile Relish Trains artfully ferrying sauerkraut cross-functionally.
RTEs — Relish Train Engineers — coordinating the "Pickle Streamlining Initiatives."

---

Where the dream almost died: arguing with consultants over Ketchup KPIs.

Soon, my cart needed a Scrum Master.
My mustard needed a Product Owner.
My hot dogs needed a quarterly roadmap with KPIs for ketchup penetration.

One cart became two.
Two became a food truck.
The food truck became a food court pop-up.
The pop-up needed a governance board.

Suddenly, Dino Dogs wasn’t mine.
It belonged to the stakeholders, the advisors, the process architects.

And the customers?
The ones who just wanted a good, simple, all-beef kosher hot dog?

They were gone too.
Drowned in the mango aioli and truffle vegan nacho chaos.

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When I woke up, sweating, clutching an imaginary condiment roadmap, I made myself a promise:

When the time comes...
I will protect the cart.
I will protect the dream.
I will grill the damn dogs.

Not everything needs to scale.
Not everything needs a framework.

Sometimes, simple isn't naive —
Simple is sacred.

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Like What You Read? Don’t Let Your Dream Get Smothered in Sauerkraut.

Subscribe — because building a simple, joyful cart is hard enough without consultants selling you a blockchain loyalty program for pickles.

Share — someone you know is one step away from franchising their Dino Dogs into a sad food court of mango aioli nachos. Save them.

Comment — tell us about the time a consultant convinced your team to launch an MVP that needed a Scrum Master just to manage the condiments.