How to build the thing [Part 3: Make it vanish]
The more your system is felt, the less it works.
The best systems don’t need to be the center of attention. They don’t demand credit or visibility. They just work.
When something actually matches the way people already think and act, it starts to fade into the background. Nobody has to say, “I’m using the sytem.” They’re just doing the work system was supposed to enable in the first place.
The quiet success
We like to celebrate launches. Demos. Dashboards. Looking at adoption curves. Common workplace rituals. But the quiet success of a system isn’t in how many people are talking about it. It’s how little they have to.
Success is when people stop noticing it’s there at all.
Just do the thing
Every release you make to a tool or piece of infrastructure, every update, should make it feel less like “using software”. We want to make it feel like “doing the thing.”
That means:
Fewer steps from intent to outcome.
Less translation between though and action.
Immediacy between what someone thinks and what actually happens.
When you reduce friction, you make the system smaller and the work bigger. That’s the direction you always want to be moving.
When the system intrudes
It’s fairly obvious when a system has too much of a presence:
People are asking, “how do I use it?” and not “what can I do with it?”
Teams talk about the process more than they talk about the output.
Success is about compliance, not delivery.
The ritual exists - tickets, status updates, checkboxes - without making progress.
The problem is that’s not structure or culture. It’s just bureaucracy disguised as enablement.
Absorb, don’t instruct
The greatest of systems feel like intuition. They don’t need onboarding decks, mandatory training - you learn through doing. They’re a mirror to how people already think and work.
Start looking, and you’ll start to see this principle everywhere:
Docs begin to emerge naturally from the work.
Slack bots surface what’s next when it’s needed.
GitHub Copilot fills in behind you while you focus on logic.
A design system isn’t something you adopt - it’s just how we build things here.
It’s not magic. It’s empathy. Designing for active fluency, not academic literacy.
Invisibility
You’re closer to success when:
New team members learn by watching and doing, not reading.
Every sprint has fewer “how do I…?” questions than the last.
You hear “this was easy,” not “I finally figured it out.”
Nobody discusses the system in retros.
Invisibility isn’t the same as absence. It means that you’ve got a took or system that’s so well aligned with your intent that it’s becoming unspoken.
The direction, not the destination
Look, you’re never going to make these systems completely invisible. That’s fine. It’s about having a goal to continually reduce its footprint - keep shifting everyone’s energy away from using the system toward doing the thing.
The first moment that people outright forget they’re “using” something, that’s when it’s finally doing its job.
Further reading:
The thing that gets you to the thing - why the tool isn’t the point
Krug, Steve. Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited. New Riders, 2014.
Part 3 in a six-part series on building in a way that serves real human outcomes.
Part 4 will be published in two weeks.