Engineering Lead
Engineering Manager, Platform Lead, Tech Lead
Your team is drowning in permission logic that isn't your product.
The pain you're feeling
- Every feature touches access control, and it's always more complex than expected
- Hardcoded rules that only one person understands
- New requirements mean refactoring, not configuration
- You're maintaining authorization code instead of building product
Your first 30 days
Quantify the tax
How much time did your team spend on access control logic in the last quarter? Include debugging, edge cases, and reviews. Be honest.
Map the current approach
Document the authorization logic in one application. Map every place where access decisions happen. This clarity alone is valuable.
Identify an externalization candidate
Find one policy domain (e.g., "who can access customer data") that could be externalized without touching everything.
Prototype the change
What would it look like to call an external policy decision point instead of inline logic? Even a stub helps visualize the path forward.
Questions to ask internally
- What's our actual cost of maintaining access logic? Time, bugs, cognitive load?
- If the business asked for a new access rule tomorrow, how fast could we deliver it?
- Could a non-developer understand our current permission logic?
Traps to avoid
- Building your own policy engine—it always starts simple and gets complex fast
- Waiting for a top-down mandate—you can advocate from where you sit
- Treating this as 'just another service'—authorization has unique requirements like latency, auditability, consistency
When to go deeper
When you've got a pilot scoped and need help on integration patterns, or when you're building the case to take this to your architect or security lead.