Vendor lock-in for small teams

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Most advice about vendor lock-in assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What to keep

Ask how you would leave before you sign. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

The practical version

Proprietary formats are the expensive kind of convenient. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

What this looks like day to day

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about vendor lock-in before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Data export should be tested, not assumed — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.