You don’t need an app. You need the app to stop being an excuse.

“We need an app for that” is one of the most common sentences in a business planning meeting, and one of the least examined. It sounds like a solution. Often, it is a way to defer a decision that is actually uncomfortable: which process to fix, which habit to change, which task to finally assign to someone.

Software is very good at making an existing process faster. It is much worse at fixing a process that does not actually work yet, no matter how it is built. An app wrapped around a broken workflow just makes the broken workflow faster to repeat.

Before the app gets scoped, the real question is smaller: what, exactly, is slow or unreliable right now, today, without any new tool? If that answer is clear, the app has a job to do. If it is not, the app is just a more expensive way of staying stuck.

Fix the process on paper first. Then decide if it still needs software.