A few years ago, when we started the company, John and I weren’t building a product. We were listening . Since then, we have continued to listen, in fact somewhat obsessively, because that's how you solve real problems for people. We are very lucky that from day one, we have had investors who are committed to us finding the right long-term solution and not chasing short-term dollars. The days of focusing on financials will come, but long-term strategic investors with deep pockets know that when you have the right product, scaling a business is easier and cheaper than trying to fit square pegs in round holes. 

Clarity starts with engineering visibility

To recap, in the early days, we learned that people wanted to know what to work on: Now, Next, or Never. This became the problem we set out to understand and eventually solve. 

Looking back, and like many things in life, it is easy to see in hindsight that the root cause of prioritization has always been, and still is, the lack of visibility. Unless you, or the tools you rely on, can clearly see and then really understand what matters, then no one has the right information to make informed decisions and act effectively or efficiently. It's also a really expensive way to work. 

One of the early and still canonical examples of this is not having visibility about what code is production and what isn’t. The result is that people run security scans on everything that they think “could” matter, spend hours verifying findings from noisy tools, and then waste lots of people's time asking them to update code and containers that essentially don’t matter. 

A critical visibility issue that has emerged from working with design partners over the last year is what we call Shadow Engineering . Most people are familiar with Shadow IT, a term used to describe IT hardware or software that is used within an organization without the knowledge or approval of the official IT department. The canonical examples of this are employees using personal laptops for work and employees running their own servers under their desks. Shadow IT has historically been blamed for the exfiltration of sensitive data and the spread of malware throughout organisations. 

Shadow IT may be a known issue with popular solutions like MDM and Zero Trust, but it still matters because it's often the foothold attackers use to breach cloud services where today’s most valuable data lives.

It’s the cloud-based engineering systems and the tools that are used to build and maintain software that are the subject of the term Shadow Engineering. These tools form a critical part of the software supply chain; hackers follow the money, and the money has moved from managed IT systems to public cloud systems. 

In the old days, Shadow IT was easy to understand because desktops and laptops ran on local area networks, servers were hosted in company data centers, and almost everyone accessed the Internet through a single control point. 

Engineering visibility starts with a single source of truth

Shadow Engineering is the new Shadow IT, but it was never just about security in the same way that Shadow Engineering isn’t either. Employees setting up and maintaining their own IT systems is time-consuming and expensive. Not leveraging central resources and tools that remove this burden for an organization results in wasted time and money.

This is what leads to, perhaps, the most fascinating and profound observation I have learned from obsessive listening: almost every visibility problem that exists is just two sides of the same coin for security teams and software engineering teams. 

If you are a security engineer, you want to understand where you pull containers from so you can make sure developers use clean, gold base images, free of as many vulnerabilities as possible. If you are in engineering, you want to make sure developers use pre-built and maintained images , so they don't have to waste time and money creating and maintaining their own. If you’re a security professional, you want to make sure you are securing all the production code; if you are an engineer, you want to say no to updating non-production code. The list goes on and on and on. 

Most engineering and security teams aren’t fundamentally misaligned; they’re working from different information, using different tools , and operating with different assumptions. That means there is no single source of truth and common agreement on what matters. The result is friction, wasted time, and a constant cycle of reacting instead of driving progress.

But when both teams operate from the same truth, the dynamic shifts. They stop working in isolation and start moving in sync. When that happens, everything from decision-making to delivery improves. Conversations become more focused, and risks surface earlier in the process. Workflows become clearer and more predictable, and instead of constantly reacting to problems, teams can start designing the systems that prevent them from happening in the first place. Or at least have a faster path to solving problems when they do arise.

How to build trust with a single source of truth

We have no interest in selling another dashboard. There are plenty of those out there, and we all know plenty of companies build their own internally. We wanted to create something that offered a shared understanding of how work flows, where risk lives, and what matters most. That’s the foundation for fast, secure, and frictionless software delivery. It’s how teams stop pulling in different directions and start compounding their impact.

That’s what we’re building at Crash Override. We’re connecting data and people, giving engineering and security teams a platform that makes trust, clarity, and velocity the default, rather than the aspiration. We believe that real velocity doesn’t come from just moving fast, but from moving fast in the same direction together.