Every system in your company was designed for someone. The question is whether that someone exists.
Most revenue systems are built for an idealized employee. She has perfect recall. She updates the CRM the moment the call ends, every call, forever. She reads every process doc, retains it, and never improvises. Her attention never fragments, her energy never dips, and nothing that happened at home this morning walks into the building with her.
She doesn’t work at your company. She doesn’t work anywhere. And every system designed for her is quietly failing the actual people who do.
—
I’ve spent this entire manifesto arguing that the humans in the building never checked themselves at the door. The ADHD is in the building. The trauma responses are in the building, wearing business casual. The nervous systems that learned to absorb ambiguity, the high performers duct-taping the gaps, the founder whose memory became the infrastructure — all of it is in the building, every day, doing the work.
So here is the design question that changes everything:
What if you built the system for *them*?
Not a lowered bar. A different blueprint.
—
Designing for actual humans means the system does the remembering. Follow-up happens because the system surfaced it, not because someone’s working memory held it across six context switches. When the process depends on a person never forgetting, you haven’t designed a process. You’ve designed a test the human will eventually fail — and then you’ll blame the human for failing it.
It means capture happens inside the work, not after it. Any step that requires stopping the real task to go feed an administrative system will be skipped on the busy days. All the important days are busy days. If your data quality depends on discipline, you don’t have a data strategy. You have a purity test.
It means ambiguity gets resolved in the design, not delegated to the person. Every undefined handoff, every fuzzy ownership line, every stage definition that lives in someone’s head — each one is a small tax on the people least able to pay it, and a shrug from the people who could have designed it away.
It means visibility that doesn’t require performance. If the only way to look competent is to narrate your work in meetings and Slack, the people who are best at narrating will look best — and the people who are best at working will look mediocre. Build systems where the work speaks, and you stop paying a fluency premium.
And it means honesty is cheap. When telling the truth about a stalled deal or a broken process costs someone status, safety, or three hours of explaining, the system will be fed fictions. Fictions compound. Design so that the truthful update is the easy update, and reality starts flowing again.
—
Notice something about that list. Nothing on it is soft.
Every item is a structural decision — about where information lives, who owns what, what the system remembers so people don’t have to. This is the part everyone gets backwards. Designing for actual humans isn’t the compassionate alternative to rigor.
It is the rigor.
Designing for imaginary humans is the sentimental choice — a belief in a workforce that has never existed, held against decades of evidence, at compounding cost.
The companies that scale cleanly aren’t staffed by better humans. They’re built on systems that expected the real ones.