The misconception that almost broke a bank's Org cleanup

A bank's Salesforce team was staring at an Apex class that handled almost every important process in their Org, a payment class. Nobody wanted to touch it. It had grown for six years, absorbed three different integration patterns, and every senior dev had a story about the one time someone changed a single line and broke reconciliation for a week.

That's the instinct I want to talk about. When a team finally decides to clean house, they go straight for the beast. The biggest Trigger, the ugliest class, the thing everyone's afraid of. Fix that first, right? It's the biggest risk, so it must be the biggest priority.

I've watched this instinct waste more cleanup budget than almost anything else.

Back to the bank. Their instinct was to open up that monster class immediately. But it was scary precisely because it was load-bearing. Half the business logic in the Org quietly depended on it, in ways nobody had documented and nobody fully remembered anymore. Refactoring it first would have meant operating on the heart before they'd even done the bloodwork.

So they didn't. They spent the first three weeks somewhere far less glamorous, dead Automation nobody used, abandoned Fields, Page Layouts from a sales process that no longer existed. Low risk, real value, and unglamorous enough that nobody would've written it up as a case study.

But here's what that work actually did: it stripped away everything that wasn't the payment class. The debug logs got quieter. The dependency map got smaller. Things the team assumed were connected to that class turned out to be dead weight sitting next to it, not touching it at all.

By the time they opened up that Apex class for real, it wasn't the six-year monster they'd walked in expecting. Half its apparent complexity had just been clutter standing in the way of seeing it clearly. The actual refactor took a fraction of the time they'd budgeted for it.

Start with what's safe to remove. Save the dragon for when you can actually see it.

If your team is afraid to change things in your own Org, that fear is the symptom. We remove it.