Sometimes the most honest thing you can say about a project is:
“It’s coming along. It’s a bit of a mess right now.” And not as a red flag. Just a fact.
Because making things — real things — is messy. Not just at the end, but all the way through.
Planning
I was invited to a one-on-one between a tech lead and another team member. I hung out. Observed. Chimed in when needed.
When their meeting ended, the tech lead and I transitioned into planning the next phase of the project. The other team member asked to stick around. Of course, we said.
We didn’t have a formal agenda. No POP framework. No neat doc with six neatly labeled Ps. Just: Here are the pieces. Here are the dates. What can we do?
We talked through ideas. Pseudo-coded some things. Took notes. Challenged each other. Eventually, something resembling clarity emerged — loose paths forward, framed by scrappy, theoretical ideas.
“In theory, if we can do this, then…” “In theory, if we had that, we could…”
Those moments — the ones we’re now betting the project on — only revealed themselves after we were rubbing our eyes, palming our faces, and pulling at our hair. Deep thinking, fast iterating, sharp questions.
By the end, I asked the other team member if hanging around had been helpful. They lit up.
“Yes!” they said. They said (and I’m paraphrasing), “It’s just good to see that even the leads struggle to figure things out. That it’s not just me.”
To which I smiled and said,
“Welcome to the mess.”
Because that’s the part we don’t always show. The part that looks less like strategy and more like scribbles. Where nothing is polished yet. Where ideas are still stretching into form.
Making omelets
There’s that old-school phrase: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” Sure. But I’d be a lot more precise than that.
Broken eggs? That’s just the beginning.
What about the mess of deciding what kind of omelet you even want to make in the first place? How much time did you spend (or waste) debating it with yourself? Trying to get consensus from everyone else?
Then, when you finally have alignment, you check the fridge. You’ve only got half the ingredients. A quarter of them have gone bad. They were buried in the back of the fridge — you kind of forgot about them. Gross. Now you’ve got a literal mess to clean up. And on top of that, you’ve got to loop back with everyone else to revise the plan.
You start chopping. Washing. Prepping. A trail of water drips from your hands — “It’s fine, it’s just water,” you tell yourself.
You’re cutting fast. Most things stay on the board. Most. Some flick off the edge. Onto the counter. Onto the floor. Not a big deal. You’ll deal with it later.
Time to whisk. You grab a bowl — the smaller one, because the big one’s in the dishwasher. As you whisk, some of the egg mixture sloshes over the side and drips down the counter. Ugh. “I should’ve used the big bowl,” you sigh. Too late now. You keep going. You add the neatly chopped ingredients. Stir gently this time. No more spills.
You pour the mixture into the pan. It starts cooking. You realize — crap — you should’ve used a ladle. Some of the egg is now running down the side of the bowl. But you’re already focused on the pan.
This part? This part is your favorite. Cooking. Finally. After all the annoying prep — now you get to turn raw ingredients into something real. Something tasty.
You reach for a plate.
As you set it down, you notice a faint thumbprint on the edge — raw egg. You must’ve touched the side of the bowl while pouring. Should’ve used that ladle. Didn’t realize your thumb caught some of the mix. You wipe it off. No big deal.
You plate the omelet. It’s perfect.
You look back: dirty pan, sticky counter, drips down the side of the mixing bowl. Bits of pepper, mushroom, and cheese scattered across the board, the counter, the floor.
And you think to yourself:
“I’ll deal with that later. First… food.”
Breakfast is served.
Making
Making is messy.
The more ambitious the thing you’re making, the messier it probably is. That’s not a flaw. That’s reality.
There’s mess in every step of the process — planning, prepping, doing, redoing. It shows up in Slack threads, late-night docs, cluttered Figma files, half-baked ideas. It leaks into your schedule, your energy, your inbox.
And that’s OK.
Tidy doesn’t always mean true. The reality of building things — real things — is rarely what you see on clean slides and sharp bullet points.
You can be a mess and still be respected. You can fumble and still be effective. You can spill and still deliver. This is not something to hide or feel ashamed of. It’s something to accept. Because the faster you acknowledge the mess, the faster you stop wasting energy trying to look clean before things are.
Like most things, mess isn’t really a problem to solve. It’s a process to manage.
So you do your best. Keep things tidy where you can. Improve the parts within reach. And then — you keep going.
Welcome to the mess!