Being where work happens helps you understand the complexity

Today I rode along with an Instabee driver on a locker delivery route, after being shown how we sort massive volumes of parcels at the terminal. 📦🚚

This is done every day. Lots and lots of important parcels delivered to customers by a whole lot of great colleagues. That is genuinely impressive!

When building digital products you don’t always have to think too much about the physical world.

But logistics is very hands-on. Parcels take up space. Someone has to lift them, sort them, drive them, place them in the right locker.

Reality will always be more complex than any system built to represent it.

he real skill is not in trying to build a system that captures everything. It is knowing what is worth modeling in the first place.

You learn that by going to where the work happens. Standing in the terminal. Riding along with a driver and picking up some of their knowledge. Watching them make a dozen crucial decisions based on experience. Toyota called it genchi genbutsu: “go and see for yourself”.

Following a parcel from the moment a merchant hands it to us until it reaches the customer (and sometimes back again) made the abstraction in the user interface so much more concrete.

Today I got to see what the digital models, types, states, entities, and screens represent. I got to ask questions and learn what I didn’t even know I was missing.

And the more I can use this to build a digital product that aligns where it matters, the better the customer experience will be.