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Why NationGraph exists
This is a very important header.
Often tools have a lot of features. This often means people configure a lot of customer workflows, which end up making the tool super slow and hard to use. People shoot themselves in the foot because they do too much.
Complexity as the status quo
“It’s like an archipelago,” explains Gabriel Peal, an engineer at OpenAI, describing his regular experience working at companies that didn’t use Linear. “Every team is on their own island, using their own tools and systems.” Projects lived in multiple tools, and many existed only in engineer’s heads.
Teams chose tools that work for their immediate needs, optimizing for local efficiency over organizational coherence. This result is a maze of disconnected systems that makes collaboration increasingly difficult.
“If you went and assigned an issue to another team,” Peal recalls, “you didn’t really know how to do that, and things would get lost.” Each handoff between teams became a potential point of failure. Every cross-team collaboration required navigating different workflows, different labels, different ways of thinking about work.
This type of challenge is particularly acute for teams building critical infrastructure alongside external partners–where coordination between teams is most important, and the impact of stale statuses or things getting lost is most heavy. Atty Eleti, who worked on OpenAI’s Apple integration explains: “Once you cut a version of an API, you have to wait until the next major version to make changes. With Apple APIs in particular, these are on device, and once a device API is shipped, you have to support it for several years. It’s really important to nail the details.”
