The new CRM went live on a Monday, with a profile for every customer visit: deal stage, confidence score, next step, next step owner, review date, risk flag, and three free-text boxes for context.
A rep filled it in after a visit that had taken twenty minutes. The form took close to ten.
By the third week she had stopped filling it in after each visit. She filled in five of them on Friday afternoon instead, from memory, before the deadline.
Confidence score, for a deal she could no longer quite place, became whatever number was fastest to click. Next step owner became her own name, because guessing someone else's took longer than guessing wrong about herself.
The dashboard built on that data looked precise down to a decimal point. It was wrong in ways nobody upstream could see, because the form had never been built to let anyone admit it was wrong.
Why we build it this way
The instinct, when a system's results are getting messy, is to add a field for whatever went wrong last time. A missed handoff gets a "next step owner" field. A deal that stalled gets a "risk flag." Each one, on its own, looks like good design — somebody thought about an edge case and built for it.
Do that for a year, across a group with ten sites that each have their own edge cases, and the form stops belonging to any of them. The fields a factory in one city needs are dead weight for a sales office in another, filled in with whatever is fastest rather than what is true. A form built to survive every objection in a design review ends up used by nobody who actually has to fill it in between customer visits.
A field that looks careful on the drawing board and gets skipped on a Friday afternoon was never careful. It was just expensive.
We start from the opposite assumption: a field is a cost charged to every person who fills in the form, forever, and it has to earn that cost from the first day. The plainer version — fewer required fields, less standing between a person and submitting the thing — is not a cut-down version waiting to be finished. It is usually the one that was right, because it is the one a tired person at the end of a long day will actually complete honestly instead of routing around.
How it works, roughly
When we design a profile or a workspace for a group with more than one site, we start from the smallest set of fields that lets the next person do their job — not the set that would survive every objection in a review.
- What the next step needs, nothing a report further downstream would use
- Which fields are required, kept to the ones that break the next person's job if left blank
- A site that needs more than the shared form gets its own addition, not a field forced onto the other nine
Once it is live, we watch what people actually type, not what they argued for in a workshop. A field that stays blank on most entries gets cut rather than defended. When someone asks for a field to be made mandatory, that request goes to whoever owns the rollout, in writing — not quietly added back by whoever was annoyed that week.
A year on, the form still takes under a minute, and the dashboard built on it is unremarkable rather than impressive — which is the only way a dashboard earns being trusted with a decision. A person still decides when a field becomes mandatory, and the record of why stays inside the group it was built for.
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