Notice the friction
Paper forms, notebooks, messages passed along by hand: the places where good people lose hours.
Step 1 / 4 · When I spot the problem
Spot the problem
Some projects start with me noticing something slow, manual or error-prone that people live with every day, and deciding it is worth fixing.
- A named problem
- A map of who is affected
What happens
In this step.
Look at the whole flow
Follow the work from the first person who touches it to the last.
Ask who feels it
Workers, supervisors, managers and payroll each experience the same problem differently.
Decide it is worth solving
A problem worth building for is one people depend on every day.
Project references
See it in real projects.
Work where this step actually happened.
Examples
What that looks like.
Example 1
Hours on four paper forms
Rannikon’s seasonal workers tracked their hours across four different paper forms, calculating by hand.
RannikonExample 2
Logs passed through Facebook groups
Supervisors sent handwritten daily logs to housemasters via Facebook groups, and housemasters sorted them by hand.
RannikonExample 3
No way to verify
Payroll received hundreds of paper submissions each month with no way to check them against the supervisors’ records.
RannikonKeep exploring
The rest of the process.
Let’s talk about your project.
Brand partnerships, freelance projects, or just to talk shop.