What Makes a Great System

The best system is the one people will actually use.

I was catching up with a former colleague last week. She co-runs an event production company, and she mentioned they'd been using ClickUp to manage their projects. What made us smile was the context: we'd both used ClickUp at a previous company together, and neither of us had good experiences with it. It became a company-wide running joke.

But at her company? It's working really well.

Same tool. Totally different experience.

The difference wasn't the software. It was how it was built. At our old company, ClickUp had been wildly overengineered with so many fields, views, and automations that it collapsed under its own weight. It wasn't frictionless. It wasn't simple. And because of that, people either powered through reluctantly, used it wrong, or quietly found their own ways of tracking things, all of which made it worse.

At her current company, it's been set up to match how their small team actually works. Clear inputs, clear outputs, and easy to open and use on any given day. That's it.

A great system doesn't have to be complex. It just has to be repeatable, frictionless, and actually used by the people it's built for. It has to work.

The fanciest setup in the world is worthless if it creates more friction and confusion than it removes.