The Most Honest Answer in Tech: It Depends.

Not sure about your timeline, but mine is filled with experts telling me that you must do X or you are wrong, only for the next expert to show up and say, “Doing X? That’s wrong. Do Y or you are doomed.”

You can apply this to almost any topic, but lately, AI seems to be getting most of the heat.

Extremes and absolutes are easy. Right or wrong. Black or white. Reality, however, is rarely that simple.

The right decision

Whenever you are making a decision - wether it is technical, people related, or strategic,- do not fall into the fallacy of thinking, “Company X did this and they were successful, so we must do the same or we will fail.”

This logic can apply to almost anything. How you build your tech, how you manage people, how you shape your product, or how you price your service.

We see it all the time. People watch cool companies explaining their approach and then conclude they must adopt the same architectural pattern they read about on Hacker News, or change everything, or else they will fail.

Another classic example is thinking that because Google has many engineering levels, we must do the same or our ten person team will not succeed.

I could go on all day, and AI is no exception. MCP is the key, implement it or become irrelevant. You are not using agents yet? Coding assistants? Pick your poison. The list is endless.

So what is the right choice?

It really depends.

It depends

One of the biggest lessons I ever learned came during my college years, eons ago.

It was in one of the most, at least in theory, boring subjects: advanced database design.

Our professor was truly exceptional. One of the brightest minds I have ever had the privilege to share a room with, combined with a world class showman.

Every class followed the same pattern: He would present a complex problem and ask, “Should we solve this by doing A?”

Immediately, half the class would agree enthusiastically, while the other half hesitated.

After a short dramatic pause, he would continue, “Or is B the right choice?” which happened to be the exact opposite.

Instantly, the sides flipped.

Suddenly, half the class was ready to fight to the death with the other half over whether A or B was the correct answer. Sound familiar?

He let it run for a few minutes, both sides making compelling arguments, each convinced the other was completely wrong.

Then he stopped us and asked, “Do you want to know the right answer?”

The room went silent. Another dramatic pause.

“It depends,” he said, and then laughed.

He did this every single class, and we fell for it every single time.

He always explained the same thing. Data matters, but context matters more. “Years later, I realized the trick wasn’t the answer. It was exposing how desperate we are for one. Leaders who succeed are not the ones who ask, “What is the right answer?” They are the ones who ask, “Under these conditions, what is right now?”

Understand your context

Whenever I am making a decision, I use a small framework based on answering a few questions about the context.

• How does success look like?

• What is the budget?

• What is the timeline?

• Who is going to use it?

• Who is going to build it?

• Is this final, or something to be iterated?

• What happens if we fail?

• Who calls the shots?

• What would make this a bad decision in six months?

This framework should always be adapted to your problem, your team, and your specific constraints. What is good for my company could kill yours.

And yes, this works pretty well for me.

But will it work for you?

It depends.

How can Pensero help here?

Now comes the part where I explain how these ideas helped shape our product.

Applying context is critical and it requires focus. Gathering data should not. That is our job. We collect, clean, and structure the noise so you can interpret it, discuss it and adapt it to your reality.

Understanding that Team A is producing more than Team B is not just about looking at numbers. It requires understanding your organizational context and constraints. One team might be building a website using continuous deployment on AWS, while another is creating a critical system within a highly restricted environment. Both are valuable, but their contexts are fundamentally different.

“Pensero exists to make those differences visible, not to flatten them. So teams stop arguing over numbers and start aligning on meaning. That is why we do not aim to replace humans, but to complement them by giving everyone a shared foundation to reason from, decide together, and move in the same direction without pretending all contexts are equal.”