Optimise for minimal effort

If you’re establishing a system of record, you should optimise for minimising effort over anything else.

Effort to populate, maintain, understand, explain, trust, use.

Because if there’s even a small amount of friction in the way of those things, you can guarantee that they won’t always be done. This might be ok for a workflow tool, but not a system of record.

Why?

A system of record can lose its value extremely quickly. All it takes is for a tiny critical mass of mistakes and neglect to begin the downward spiral of lost trust and further apathy. All the fun features downstream of dirty data are useless.

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