Music for the Soul.
Code for the Bowl.

I’ve recently found myself on both sides of the same administrative problem.

As a supplier, I’m being asked to navigate customer procurement systems, complete forms and deal with questions about withholding tax.

As a customer, I’m waiting for a software company to process my request to buy something.

Different organisations. Different systems. Same underlying problem.

The outcome is straightforward, but getting there requires somebody outside the organisation to understand and operate its internal processes.

We’ve become very good at building systems around how organisations work.

Perhaps we should spend more time thinking about how people actually get things done.

The customer shouldn’t need to understand your organisation to do business with it.

We’ve been running some modest paid campaigns for our software and our Workshop content.

The Workshop campaigns are generating considerably more engagement than the product introductions.

Even when we restricted the audience to the UK, Ireland, US and Canada, the difference remained substantial.

That’s interesting.

Perhaps people aren’t particularly interested in another company telling them about another piece of software.

But they might be interested in the problem you’re trying to solve, why you think it matters, and what you’ve learned while trying to solve it.

Of course, engagement isn’t adoption. It certainly isn’t revenue.

But perhaps the first thing people need to buy into isn’t the software.

It’s why you built it.

Before I went away, I delivered the new activation server for our products.

The expectation was that the updated product builds would be ready and talking to it by the time I returned.

I even predicted they probably wouldn’t be.

And here we are.

One unexpected consequence of working extensively with AI agents is how accustomed I’ve become to the speed of the feedback loop. Specify an outcome, review the plan, implement, test, correct, repeat.

It doesn’t always work first time. Sometimes it makes a complete mess. But the next iteration can begin almost immediately.

Once you’re used to that, ordinary organisational latency becomes painfully visible.

If only my employees were agentic.