At Intercom, they prioritized building "boring" software that solves real customer problems over investing in complex technology. However, as their database architecture grew to unprecedented scales, they faced a scalability problem and had to find a long-term solution. They transitioned to sharded databases, horizontally partitioning their tables into many different databases to scale horizontally by adding more partitions or shards. This required organizational flexibility and maturity to allocate resources and dedicate time to finding a solution. After nine years of growth, they benchmarked their clusters, tested hypotheses, and documented their learnings to ensure the project's success. The final result was a sharded database solution that delivered value at every step of the journey, allowing them to complete the massive project while avoiding wasted effort. This experience showcases Intercom's increasing organizational maturity and ability to make big plays with big rewards.