This is my first blog post. I had a plan for it but woke up this morning with something different on my mind, so I'm going with that instead. Some things you have to get off your chest first.
Walk through any boardroom and you'll hear the same chorus: own the data and you win. Own the workflow and you win. Pick your moat, plant your flag, defend it.
Both are real. But I think they're the wrong place to plant the flag.
What you want to own is the experience.
By experience I mean three things:
- It's easy to use. A person can just use it, no manual, no training session.
- It produces the right outcome. Not activity. Not a dashboard. The result they came for.
- It has real impact. Their day is better, and they'd be annoyed if you took it away.
And when I say experience, I mean the whole thing, end to end. The software and the service around it. For everyone who touches it, not just the person who signed the contract. The buyer matters. So does the employee three desks away who actually has to use it.
The kitchen versus the meal
Picture a restaurant. The owner is obsessed with two things: the finest ingredients and the most efficient kitchen.
You sit down. The food comes out cold. The server can't answer a question. The check takes forty minutes. You walk out and never go back.
That owner owned the ingredients and the workflow. He lost the only thing that mattered, which was your night out.
Data is the ingredients. Workflow is the kitchen. The experience is the meal. Nobody drives across town for the supply chain. They come back for how it felt to eat there.
The phone in your pocket is the same story. Plenty of phones had longer spec sheets. The one that won was the one you took out of the box and just used.
The part I find sad
Here's what happens at a lot of legacy businesses. They want to improve the experience, but it costs real time and money, and sometimes their software just won't let them. So they do what they can, then settle in and tell themselves a story: "Our system is too complex and expensive to move off of. Nobody's leaving. We're safe."
Some even treat that as a strength. People stay because leaving is too painful, not because the experience is good. I've always found that a little sad. You've trapped someone instead of earning them.
Flip it around. What if it were easy to switch, and people stayed anyway because the experience was so good they didn't want to? That's a different kind of company. That's the one I want to build.
What this looks like for us
I'll keep this short, because this post isn't a pitch.
We're building LegalOperator, and this belief is the whole reason it exists. A legal team is drowning in routine questions. Meanwhile the rest of the business waits. Someone needs a quick answer, sends the question over, and then sits in the gap. Days, weeks pass. They follow up. They route around it. Friction on one side, interruption on the other, and nobody enjoying any of it.
So we went after the experience for both sides. Someone asks a question where they already work and gets an answer. No new app. No ticket number. No three-day wait. The hard machinery sits behind the curtain. The person just gets unstuck and gets on with their day.
The takeaway
Build experiences that serve all stakeholders, the whole way through. Data and workflow have their place. But if all they do is push more work at people faster, that isn't a good experience. It's just a busier one.
Own the data, and you own a thing. Own the experience, and you earn a bond.
I know which one I'd rather have.
Thanks for reading my first one. Now I can get to the post I'd actually planned.
