“Just Ask Me” Is Not a Process

“Just ask me” sounds generous. It is also how a lot of companies accidentally design themselves.

It feels faster than documentation. It feels more human than a workflow. It keeps the founder in the loop, which can be mistaken for control. What it actually does is hide the process in a person — usually the person who is already the most expensive bottleneck in the building.

If you cannot point to the owner, the sequence, the exception path, and the definition of done, the process is living somewhere else. In a head. In an inbox. In a spreadsheet with a private logic. In a message thread that will be impossible to reconstruct in three months.

That can still “work.” Work is not the test. Repeatability is the test. Handoff is the test. A Tuesday when that person is in back-to-back meetings is the test.

A process that requires a specific human to interpret it is a preference with a job title.

Asking is fast when the volume is low. It also trains the organisation to stop thinking at the edge of the founder’s attention. People do not build judgment. They build access. The person with answers becomes the person with a queue.

Then the queue gets moral language. “I’m just being helpful.” “It’s quicker if I do it.” “They’ll get it wrong.” Sometimes they will get it wrong — especially if the standard was never made visible. That is not a reason to keep the standard in your head. That is the reason to take it out.

Not a novel. Not a mural on Confluence. Enough structure that someone who was not in the original conversation can finish the work without a séance.

Who owns it. What “start” looks like. What “done” looks like. What happens when the case is not standard. Where the record lives. Who is allowed to decide without a meeting.

If those answers only exist when you are in the room, the room is the software. That is a very old, very fragile product.

You can keep being the person people ask. Some of that will always be the job.

You cannot keep calling it a process. A process is what still works when nobody has to ask you.