I Built the Product After Watching Someone Do It the Hard Way

I was sitting beside a teammate when I noticed they were doing something in four steps that should have taken one. I asked why. They said, “That's just how we've always done it.” That sentence is dangerous. I watched the process from beginning to end and realized half of the work existed because two systems didn't talk to each other properly. I couldn't fix the systems immediately, so I built a small workaround in Greta. It wasn't elegant. It just gave the team one place to do the task instead of jumping between tools. The first person to use it finished in less than half the time. They looked at the screen and said, “Wait, that's it?” Exactly. The task had never been difficult. We'd just built a process around the difficulty. Sometimes building a small tool is less about creating something new and more about exposing how unnecessary the old process was.