Some of you may be thinking one simple system is becoming difficult, this sounds even more complicated.

But hear me out. It's not. In fact, it makes the work simpler. I know, how can more systems make it simpler? It is already an effort to create the systems you've been trying to create. Counter intuitive, but works wonders.

I'll take a simple example to illustrate this: Dashboards & reports of all kinds are commonplace in businesses. If you've ever looked at them, most of the time, you'll see a whole mess of spreadsheets, scripts and a thousand different things just hacked together. This allows them just enough visibility to justify such a contraption, but it's just a mess. Any and every change requires guts, because it is difficult to know what connects where & why. Each one is a system by itself, in the wrong est possible way.

Now, instead of this, if you fix a template of how a dashboard should connect to data; how it should look and feel; how often it should update things, then it's a different story altogether. Every report and every dashboard that gets added will feel like an integral extension of the template. They will collectively feel like a single system in complete harmony. Any new requirements now become very quick & easy to implement & any fixes straightforward.

A huge side benifit is that if a bug is caught and solved in one of them, it gets solved for everywhere else.

The best thing however of having systems that make systems is that they give an exponential amount of clarity, as compared to a single system.

A couple of real world examples are:

1. Instead of writing SOPs, also write an SOP on how and why to read, write and mentain one in the first place!

2. Look up the origin story of material design, which was born from a frustration of maintaining different parts and pieces for everything at Google. This is a system for a variety of products like Gmail, Chroma, Android, Maps, and the slew of AI apps released by them.

Cheers!