We replaced our expenses system in 2024. The one before it was genuinely awful, the new one is competent, and the satisfaction score barely moved. I sat with fifteen managers to find out why, expecting to hear about the change itself.
Not one of them mentioned the old system. They compared it with their banking app, with the way a supermarket account remembers a card, with a phone that reads a receipt and fills in the date. A depot supervisor asked why she has to type a figure she has just photographed. She was not being difficult. She was describing something her phone did for her that morning.
That comparison is the change I think will define the next ten years of this job. For most of my career the software people used at work was the most sophisticated software in their lives, so an internal system was judged against the thing it replaced or against nothing at all. For almost everybody in this company that is now reversed, and it goes on getting worse for us every year without anybody deciding anything.
The mismatch sits in how we buy. Our evaluation scores features, because features can be listed in a matrix and defended to a committee. Nobody experiences a feature matrix. People experience the number of steps between wanting something and having it, and the demonstration is given to a room of people who will use the product a few times a year. We buy for the buyer, and we have done for as long as I have been signing things.
What I expect to become normal is evidence. Timing the ten most common tasks with real staff on the shortlisted products, and publishing those times alongside the price. Refusing products that demonstrate well and test badly. Spending our own effort on the last hundred yards, the prefilled field and the sensible default, which is unglamorous work that no business case has ever contained.
The uncomfortable part is that the standard is set by companies that have never heard of us, for consumers rather than for employees, and it rises every year whether or not we buy anything at all.
– Serguey Shinder
