Where does the work live?
Most tools feel clunky because the work underneath them is scattered. Give it one home, and the experience gets a lot easier to design.
Every company I walk into has the same setup. A CRM, a project board, a shared drive full of folders, a chat app, and one spreadsheet quietly holding it all together. Each tool made sense the day someone signed up for it. Together they make a maze.
You can hear it in how people talk. "I know we have that deck somewhere." "Which version did the client approve?" "Can you resend the link?" Good people lose real hours every week looking for work that already exists. McKinsey Global Institute found that knowledge workers spend about a fifth of their time just tracking down information.1
So when a team tells me their tools feel clunky, I ask one question before I look at a single screen: where does the work actually live?
The pile in the middle of the room
When I organize anything, a garage, a hard drive, a closet, I start by pulling everything into one big pile in the middle of the room. It looks worse before it looks better. To me that pile means progress, because the pattern only shows up once everything’s in one place.
Most companies have a bigger pile than they realize. BetterCloud's State of SaaS research puts the average company at more than a hundred SaaS apps.2 Any single piece of work is usually spread across five or six of them, and each one holds a slightly different copy of the truth. The deck sits in the drive, the approved version is attached to an email, the feedback is buried in chat, and the final export is on someone's desktop. Nobody is doing anything wrong. The work just has no home.
The library is the core
The idea I build around now is simple: the library is the core. Files, documents, decks, social posts, recordings and meeting notes live in one place underneath everything else. One record for each thing, one current version, one set of rules for how it's named.
Everything people see becomes a view of that library. A resource hub for the sales team is a view. A client portal is a view. The files tab on a task is a view. It's the same work, shown to different people for different jobs.
In Traction, Gino Wickman quotes Dan Sullivan: "No further progress and growth is possible for an organization until a new state of simplicity is created."3 One library underneath everything is that new state of simplicity, applied to the work itself.
Experience starts with how the information is organized, long before anyone sees a screen.
Set it up that way, and a lot of problems quietly go away. The designer uploads once. The sales rep searches once. The client opens one link and sees exactly what needs their review. Nobody asks which version is final, because there is only one.
What people actually notice
The best compliment a system can get is that nobody thinks about it. File handling should be so streamlined that people don't even question it. You click, the thing is there, you move on with your day.
That's what experience means to me in practice. The team feels it first: fewer follow-ups, fewer "can you send that again" messages, less time hunting. Clients feel it right after, in faster answers and cleaner handoffs.
Where AI fits
AI made this more urgent. Every team I work with is producing more drafts, more decks and more variations than ever. Easy to produce, expensive to review. If all of that lands in five different places, AI just makes the pile bigger, faster.
With one library underneath, AI gets genuinely useful. It can find the right file, summarize what changed and connect a meeting to the work it was about, because the work is all in one place.
How to start
Crawl, walk, run.
- Crawl: pick one type of work, client deliverables for example, and decide its one home. Write down how files get named.
- Walk: point every other tool at that home with a link instead of a copy. Chat, email and tasks reference the file; they never hold their own version.
- Run: build the views people need on top of it, like a client portal, a sales hub or one search box across everything.
Fix where the work lives, and the screens get a lot easier to design. Almost every experience problem I get asked to solve starts right there.
References
- McKinsey Global Institute, Social media's productivity payoff, August 2012: interaction workers spend "another 19% of the time trying to track down information." mckinsey.com ↩︎
- BetterCloud, 2025 State of SaaS, April 2025. "Companies have an average of 106 SaaS apps, down from 112 in 2023." bettercloud.com ↩︎
- Gino Wickman, Traction, quoting Dan Sullivan of The Strategic Coach. ↩︎