While working with a number of different teams building digital products, I’ve often encountered the same belief: that using a specific tool, when properly utilised and configured, will enable us to do our best work.
But tools don’t really matter. Process matters.
Sure, there are good tools and bad tools. But too often we spend our precious focus and energy on the tool, not the work. We spend countless hours creating the perfect Notion instances, Slack automations, Clickup spaces, etc. It’s like we’re painters obsessing over brush choice instead of technique.
Many commit the fallacy of thinking the right tool can solve all their problems, often for one of a few reasons. Firstly, tool makers explicitly sell us this fallacy constantly. Notion promises us “Better, faster work”, Clickup says we’ll get more work done, Basecamp helps teams “move faster”, and Jira tells us we’ll “Move fast, stay aligned, and build better - together” with their tool. These companies have an existential incentive to convince you that their tool will solve the problems you’re facing. Who can blame us for believing them?
Another common belief that makes us turn to “tool-worship” is thinking that using the right tool can create or enforce process. Team not working smoothly? Maybe they will if we use Basecamp! While tooling features can to some degree enforce practices, the “roots” of these habits aren’t deep - we’re doing them because the tool prompts us, without always understanding the deeper meaning of why we’re doing them. When adversity strikes or we switch tools, these habits are at risk of falling by the wayside if we’re relying on the tools to enforce them.
Which brings me to what really, actually matters: process. It’s not interesting, it’s not sexy, and it’s totally obvious. The way you do things trumps what tool you use every time. Taking the effort to develop buy-in and enthusiasm about the intentional choices you make about how things are done will lead to a more effective team, no matter the tool you’re using.
How do we actually realise the promises of tool makers’ marketing pitches? Relentlessly interrogating and questioning why we do what we do, finding the right process for this context and this team, and committing to it.
Remember when I said tools don’t matter? What I really meant was that teams can do great work (and terrible work) with most tools. In some contexts, there are absolutely wrong choices for your team, and being savvy about process helps clarify what those requirements are.
Take the example of running digital experimentation programmes. When running such programmes, it’s critical to have an overview of experiments in terms of “slots”, or where on a website or product the experiment will run. Having this overview reduces the risk of conflicting experiments and allows us to maximise the number of effective experiments we can run in a given time. In this scenario, any tool that doesn’t offer some kind of feature to visualise our “slots”, such as “swimlanes”, won’t work for us.
Becoming an expert in your process earns you the right to be picky about tooling. If you feel confident about your process, you’ll know what you need from a tool to run that process. If you’re not sure what you need, focus first on perfecting the process - most tools will be fine for now.
If you take one thing away from this post, it’s that the way you work shouldn’t be tied to a specific tool - rather the tool should be able to fit into your way of working. Changing course and moving everything over to a new tool can take time, but in many cases the intense rivalry between different services (ex. Notion vs. Jira vs. Monday vs. Clickup) means that each service offers options to import content from one tool to another relatively smoothly. Moreover, the concept of “tool debt” is a real thing - a complex Notion space can require meaningful time and energy just to keep running. At what point does time spent switching tools get overtaken by the time spent making the tool work for us?
Tool choices don’t need to feel like irreversible decisions as long as you aren’t trying something new every month (remember the “committing to it” bit from above about process? That applies to tools as well).
This post was written in Notion, but it doesn’t really matter - that’s the point.