Every change we make to the software is saved with a date and a short note. Read seven months of them in a row and a route appears.
It is not the route you would draw on a whiteboard. Nobody decided to do customer service in May. The first real order arrived and made it urgent. The order you automate things in is not something you plan once. It is something the business keeps telling you, if you listen.
That order turned out to matter more than any single tool we built. Get it wrong and you polish parts of the company nobody is using yet. Get it right and each finished part hands you the next one.
The map
Each row is a part of the business. Each column is a month. The darker the square, the more of that month went into it.
Seven chapters
Look before you build.
The first thing we built was not a store. It was a tool that reads which ads other brands keep paying for. Money that keeps being spent is the most honest signal of demand there is.
Cut it back, then split it three ways.
We stripped the app down to that one research tool. Then three people built research, the store and customer service side by side, and merged them on April 2.
The first sale, during an outage.
We made the software run on its own schedule and pick up where it stopped after a crash. On April 23 the first real order came in, in the middle of a six-hour outage of our own software. The shop took the payment, but nothing on our side heard about it until we fixed the crash and replayed the order. That morning decided what came next.
The order pulls in the back office.
Customer service, emails, order handling, payments and bookkeeping all peak in the same month. Nothing in the plan said so. A real customer waiting for a real parcel did.
Let it practise before it acts.
Customer replies ran silently next to the humans to measure how often they would have been right. They were then switched on one type of question at a time. The same month we built the steps for opening a second store.
Go deep where the money is.
Ads went from filling in templates to studying ads that already work and making our own versions of them. It was the busiest month, and July 27 was the busiest day: 270 changes.
Make it work twice.
Everything that was built for one store was reworked to run several from one setup. A new store now starts in its own language, with its own ad accounts, on day one.
One part, up close
No part of the company goes from people to software in one step. Customer service shows the climb most clearly.
It drafts.
The AI writes the reply. A person reads it and presses send.
It sends the easy ones.
Only simple confirmations go out alone. An attempt to widen that too early was rolled back within days.
It practises in silence.
It answers every message but sends nothing, and we count how often it would have been right.
It earns it, one type at a time.
Each kind of question is switched on only once its record is good enough. Three kinds stay with people.
It keeps going when parts fail.
If the checker is down, it falls back safely. Every reply it sends alone is written to a log.
Where it stands today: sending fully on its own is not switched on yet. About 70% of drafts pass every check. Turning on the rest is a decision we have not made, and we would rather say so than round it up.
In numbers
If we did it again
Five rules the route taught us.
Start where the money is decided.
Before building anything, find out what people already pay for. Research came first, and its share shrank as soon as the answer was clear.
Build the engine before the office.
The store and the ads are what bring money in. Everything else only matters once they work.
Let the first real order write the next plan.
One customer did more for our priorities than a month of planning. Get to a real order fast, then follow what breaks.
Climb in small steps.
Drafts, then easy cases, then silent practice, then one category at a time. Each step has to prove itself before the next.
Once it works once, make it work twice.
Anything that only runs one store is still a prototype. The last two months went into making all of it repeatable.
You cannot plan the order in advance. You can only build the part in front of you well enough that it shows you the next one.
Next · Field study 07 · Memory