You Only Need to Define the Destination

Field Note #03: You Only Need to Define the Destination

The trap of waiting until you know everything

I've watched teams stall for weeks, sometimes months, because they wanted to define the "perfect" process before they started using it. Every edge case had to be accounted for. Every step had to be documented. Every approval chain had to be mapped. And while they planned, the actual work kept piling up, still being handled through Slack messages, emails, and hallway conversations.

The irony was brutal. The reason they needed a process was because work was chaotic and untracked. But the act of defining the process became its own bottleneck, because they believed they had to know the entire trail before taking the first step.

Why "perfect first" fails

The desire to fully define a workflow before deploying it sounds responsible. It sounds thorough. But in practice, it creates a set of problems that are worse than the chaos it's trying to replace.

1. You don't know the trail until you've walked it

Processes look different on paper than they do in practice. The handoff you assumed would take an hour actually takes three days because it depends on an external vendor. The approval step you thought was straightforward actually involves two different managers depending on the dollar amount. You don't discover these realities in a planning meeting. You discover them mid-climb, when the terrain surprises you.

Every team I've worked with that tried to design a perfect workflow upfront ended up rewriting it within the first month of using it. The planning didn't save time. It just delayed the learning.

2. It creates a dependency on the "trail guide"

When process definition requires completeness, it usually means one person, the admin, the ops lead, the team manager, becomes the gatekeeper. Nothing gets formalized until they have time to sit down, think through every scenario, and build it out. Meanwhile, the team is stuck waiting.

I've seen this pattern so many times. A team identifies a process that needs structure. They bring it to the person responsible for setting things up. That person has a backlog of their own. Weeks go by. The team goes back to handling things informally because they can't afford to wait. And the process never gets built.

The trail guide becomes a bottleneck, not because they're slow, but because the system demands that they evaluate and define everything before anyone else can move.

3. It assumes the process won't change

A fully defined process is a snapshot. It captures how things work right now. But teams evolve. Regulations shift. New tools get introduced. People leave and new people join. The process you spent three weeks perfecting starts drifting from reality the moment it goes live.

If the system makes it hard to adjust, people stop adjusting. They work around the process instead of within it. And you're back to square one: undocumented workarounds that nobody tracks.

What actually works

The approach that I've seen succeed, the one that shaped how I built Everstep, is simpler than most people expect: define the destination, not every step to get there.

You know what the end result should be. A new employee is onboarded. An IT access request is fulfilled. A vendor is approved. That's the summit. You can see it clearly from the base. You don't need to map every trail before you start climbing.

Start with the steps you know. Maybe it's three tasks out of what will eventually be eight. That's fine. Create the service. Start running tickets through it. And when you hit a step that's missing, when someone says "wait, we also need to do this before we can move on," you add it. Right there. In the live ticket. And now you have a living document to repeat and improve.

The best processes aren't designed in advance. They're discovered in motion and captured along the way.

How Everstep handles this

This is one of the core principles I built into Everstep. Services define the structure, the destination and the known steps. But tickets are alive. When a team member realizes mid-workflow that a step was missed, they don't have to file a request with an admin to update the workflow. You add a task directly into the ticket. The work keeps moving.

That added task isn't lost. It becomes visible. It shows up in the ticket's history. And when you notice the same task being added across multiple tickets, that's your signal: it belongs in the service definition. Now you bake it in, not because someone guessed it should be there, but because the work itself proved it was necessary.

This is what I mean by the trail revealing itself. You don't need to predict every obstacle. You need a system that lets you respond to what you find and capture it for the next person climbing behind you.

• Services define the destination — the outcome and the known steps to get there
• Tickets allow course corrections — tasks can be added mid-workflow without waiting on an admin
• Patterns emerge from real work — repeated ad-hoc tasks signal what should be formalized into the service

The admin isn't the bottleneck anymore

In traditional tools, changing a workflow is an admin function. Someone with the right permissions has to evaluate the change, update the template, and redeploy it. That might make sense for enterprise systems where a single change affects thousands of users. But for small teams? It's overhead that kills momentum.

Everstep treats the service definition as a living thing. The admin sets the baseline. The team refines it through use. When a task gets added to three tickets in a row, the admin doesn't have to investigate or reverse-engineer what happened. They can see it, and deciding whether to make it permanent is a quick, informed decision instead of a research project.

The team doesn't wait for the trail guide to evaluate the terrain. They mark the trail as they climb, and the guide updates the map when the pattern is clear.

Start with what you know

If you've been putting off formalizing a process because you don't have all the details yet, stop waiting. Define the outcome. Add the steps you're confident about. Start running requests through it. The missing pieces will surface on their own, and when they do, you'll capture them in context instead of guessing from a conference room.

You don't need a complete map to start climbing! You need a destination and the willingness to mark the trail as you go.

The summit doesn't move. The path to it just gets clearer with every step.