Be Useful

Nobody in the room noticed the first time it worked. The standup just moved faster. People came in already knowing what was blocked, who needed to unblock it, what could wait. The thirty-minute warm-up conversation we used to have every morning just… stopped happening.

What I had built was a script that pulled from Jira and dropped a summary into Slack before anyone logged on. Embarrassingly simple. But I watched people shift from scattered to focused in the span of a week, and something about that felt more satisfying than anything I had shipped before.

That’s when I started thinking differently about what I was actually trying to do.

The question that reframes everything

Most people, when they build something, are asking “does this work?” I think the better question is “does this help?”

They sound the same but they pull you in different directions. “Does this work” is about the thing. “Does this help” is about the person on the other end of it. And once you start asking the second one, you can’t really go back to just asking the first.

I think about it almost mathematically. How many people are affected, multiplied by how much their situation actually improves. That’s the number worth caring about. Not the complexity of the solution, not whether anyone finds it impressive, just the real delta in someone’s day because you made the thing.

A team of ten people who stop losing an hour to noise every morning is a real number. It doesn’t need to be a million users to matter.

What it feels like when you miss

I have also built things that didn’t do that, and there’s a specific kind of quiet that comes with realizing it.

You were trying to fix a problem, you shipped something, and the pain is still there, just wearing a slightly different shape. The thing works, technically. But you missed the point.

What I try not to do is stay in that feeling too long. Missing the point isn’t failure, it’s just incomplete understanding, and the only honest response is to recalibrate and go again with better information. Every miss sharpens the next attempt if you’re actually paying attention to why you missed. The ones who stay useful over a long time are usually just the ones who are willing to be wrong without making it mean something about them.

On vanity, and why I don’t write it off completely

There’s a version of this conversation where I say clout-chasing is shallow and real builders just ship quietly. I used to believe that more cleanly than I do now.

The truth is I have watched genuinely useful ideas die because nobody with the authority to move on them could see the point. Sometimes the person approving the work doesn’t have the technical context to understand why it matters. Sometimes you have to dress the idea in language they can receive, even if that language involves a bit of performance.

That’s not ideal. But the alternative, which is being right and invisible, doesn’t actually help anyone. So I have made a kind of peace with vanity as a tool, as long as it’s pointing toward something real. The moment it becomes the destination is when it stops serving the work and starts replacing it.

What I am still figuring out

I don’t always know if the problem I am solving is the real problem or just the one that’s most visible. I build something, watch how people actually use it, and often find that the real friction was three steps upstream from where I was looking. That used to frustrate me more than it does now.

The goal is to be genuinely useful, to add more than you take, to help people think more clearly and move with less resistance. I don’t think that goal ever fully resolves into a checklist. It’s more like a direction you keep orienting toward, adjusting as you go, staying honest about the gap between where you are and where you’re trying to get.

Some days the gap is small. Some days you ship something and realize you were solving the wrong thing entirely. Both are fine, as long as you keep moving toward the actual problem.