Integrations are the most reasonable mistake a growing company makes.
The logic is impeccable: you already own the tools, the tools have APIs, you wire them together, and now they "talk." For a while, this works. The duct tape holds.
Then the duct tape becomes the thing you maintain. Every upgrade is a migration. Every new requirement is an integration discussion. Every outage is a forensic exercise across four vendors. The team starts to feel that the integration layer is the system — and in a way, it is.
The shift happens when you stop asking which tools should we connect and start asking what is the one system this business actually runs on?
That second question is harder. It also has a real answer. The first one never does.