My mother made chai every morning of my childhood using a masala she'd mixed herself. Cardamom, ginger, black pepper, cloves, sometimes cinnamon. The proportions weren't written down anywhere. They existed in her hands. And the thing I didn't understand until much later is that the masala wasn't just a collection of spices. it was a specific theory about how they should work together. Change the proportion and you change the chai. Add too much of one thing and the others disappear. The balance is the point.
Masala means "mixture" in Hindi and Urdu. But that translation undersells it. A masala isn't random. You can't make one by throwing spices together and hoping they resolve. The proportions matter. The order sometimes matters. The combination creates something that no single ingredient could. a flavor profile that's more specific, more complete, more itself than any component could be alone. Remove one element and the whole thing shifts.
This is, I've come to believe, exactly how the best teams work.
What Uniformity Costs You
The failure mode in technology teams is uniformity. It's seductive because it's efficient in the short run: hire from the same schools, the same companies, the same background. Onboarding is faster. Code review is smoother. Nobody has to translate across different ways of thinking. The team moves quickly and the friction is low.
But uniformity means shared blindspots. When everyone on the team has the same training, the same mental models, the same way of framing problems, they will systematically fail to see the same things. They'll optimize for what they know how to measure and miss what falls outside their frame. They'll confuse fluency with wisdom. being fast at something doesn't mean you're asking the right questions about whether it should be done at all.
Healthcare tech is full of this particular failure. I've seen teams of genuinely brilliant engineers build software for clinical workflows without a single person on the team who has ever sat inside one. They make design decisions that are technically sound and operationally catastrophic. because the software gets used at 2am by an exhausted nurse who has seven other tasks open, and that reality was never part of the mental model. The blindspot wasn't individual. It was architectural. It was baked into who was in the room.
A great team isn't a collection of great individuals. it's a specific proportion of different kinds of greatness. The blend is the design decision. Get the proportions wrong and the whole thing tastes off.
The Post-Merger Version of This Problem
When two companies merge, there are two established cultures, two sets of "how we do things," two product surfaces that each team believes is the real one. The obvious trap is to treat integration as a zero-sum contest. one culture wins, the other gets absorbed, and you move on. It's the fastest path to retention problems, institutional knowledge loss, and a team that's technically unified but psychologically fractured.
The less obvious opportunity is harder to see in the middle of the chaos: you have two different masalas in front of you. Each has been developed over years of experience in a specific context. Neither is complete on its own. The question isn't which one to use. it's whether you can find the proportion that's better than either.
That requires actively choosing what to keep from each side, not just defaulting to the acquiring company's way of doing things. It requires being genuinely curious about why the other team did what they did. not to validate it uncritically, but to understand what problem they were solving. Sometimes the answer is "that was a workaround for a limitation we don't have." Sometimes the answer is "that's actually smarter than what we've been doing." Both answers are useful. Only one of them is accessible if you've decided in advance that your approach is the baseline.
Team Building as Active Curation
As a CPTO, the most consequential thing I do isn't the architecture decisions or the roadmap debates or the budget conversations. though those matter. It's who is in the room. Every hiring decision, every team structure choice, every decision about who owns what is a decision about the blend. Get the proportions right and the team generates more insight than any individual could. Get them wrong and you've built a team that's fast in one dimension and blind in another.
What does the right blend look like? You need people who see the detail and people who see the whole. You need builders and translators. people who can make the thing and people who can explain what the thing means to someone outside the room. You need people who know the domain cold, who've spent years inside the workflows and the regulations and the incentive structures of healthcare. And you need people who are new enough to ask the obvious questions that everyone else stopped asking years ago, because the obvious questions are often the important ones.
You need people who challenge the status quo and people who hold it steady. not because stability is the goal, but because change without continuity creates chaos and continuity without change creates stagnation. The tension between those two orientations, held together in the same room, produces something neither could produce alone.
This is what masala means to me in the context of this work. Not a metaphor for diversity as a checkbox. A genuine operational theory about how the best thinking happens. through intentional combination, in the right proportions, of things that are individually incomplete.