The Build
Signal & Strategy. The Leadership Layer, Part Three: Direction
My first real software implementation was for a client unlike the ones the playbook was written for.
They were buried in manual work. Whole processes that ran on memory and spreadsheets and the same few people staying late to hold it together. You know the kind of place. Everyone can see the system is running on effort, and no one has the time to fix the reason it has to.
We came in with new technology. And somewhere in those early discovery conversations, the project stopped feeling like a deployment and started feeling like play. We were not only turning manual work into automated work, the obvious win. We were using the tool in ways it was never built for. Functions meant for compliance reporting, bent into engines for analysis. Features designed to do one thing quietly doing three. I had used software to make work faster before. I had never watched a tool become something larger than its own manual, in real time, with the people who would use it sitting right there.
It worked. We finished in half the time a build like that usually takes. Everyone was happy. Everyone was using it. The business could do things it had never been able to do before. By every measure anyone in that room was tracking, it was a win. It was mine. I was proud of it.
I still am, mostly.
Six years later, I went back and looked at that implementation. And what I saw first was not the success. It was everything we left on the table. How much more it could have been. Not for the employees who used it every day. For the people those employees were there to serve.
Here is the thing I never did. At no point in that entire project did I stop and ask how any of it would land for the person the organization actually existed to support. We built the whole thing around the employee. Faster for them. Cleaner for them. Fewer late nights for them. All real, all good. And not once did we ask, just as hard or harder, what this software would mean for the person on the other end of that employee’s work.
That person was never in a discovery conversation. Never a line in a requirements document. Never the subject of a single decision we made.
We optimized for the organization. Not because anyone decided the organization mattered more. Because the organization was the only thing anyone had pointed at.
That is what took me six years to see. When no one says out loud who the work is for, the work aims itself. And it aims at the nearest target, which is almost always the organization’s own convenience. Not from bad intent. From silence. The direction was never set, so the default took over. The default is always us.
Not long ago, a sandwich chain called Jersey Mike’s passed Chick-fil-A in customer satisfaction, ending an eleven-year run at the top. Their founder, who bought the first shop at seventeen, gets asked constantly what the secret is. His answer has not changed in decades. At every meeting, in front of corporate staff and store owners alike, he names the same few things. Fresh bread. Clean store. And then: share your life with the customer.
That company later spent close to a hundred and eighty-five million dollars on technology and infrastructure. The technology did not set the direction. It inherited it. The aim was already fixed on the person across the counter, so when the tools arrived, they amplified the aim.
My tools arrived too. They inherited what I gave them. And what I gave them was an aim pointed at everything except the person we were there for.
The software was never the variable. It did exactly what we asked of it. The only variable was whether anyone had decided, and said out loud, who all of it was for.
A tool can only point where the organization is already pointed. Give it clarity and it multiplies the clarity. Give it a building full of capable people who have never named who they serve, and it multiplies that instead. It makes you faster at going wherever you were already going. Even when no one ever decided where that was.
The implementation succeeded. I am still proud of the speed.
But fast is not the same as aimed. And six years is a long time to learn the difference between a project that worked and a project that mattered.
Sources. Satisfaction ranking: American Customer Satisfaction Index, Restaurant and Food Delivery Study 2026 (released June 16, 2026), theacsi.com. Jersey Mike’s debuts at 84, ahead of Chick-fil-A at 83, ending an eleven-year run as the top quick-service brand. Technology investment and the “IT company” framing: QSR Magazine, “Culture Fuels Jersey Mike’s Rise to the Sandwich Elite.” “Share your life with the customer”: Peter Cancro, on the Jedburgh Podcast.