The intern test
Hand any system to the newest person and watch. What breaks in their first week is the software’s real report card.
Here is a cheap way to grade any software your company runs: hand it to the newest person and watch. If they can do the real job within a day, it passes. If they need two weeks of shadowing, folklore, and one labelled spreadsheet to survive — that isn’t training. That’s the software’s report card.
Why new people are the best auditors
Experienced staff run a hybrid: half software, half private knowledge. The password on the sticky note. The tab you never click. The order you do things in, because doing it in the other order double-charges somebody. After a while the two halves are indistinguishable — the system feels like it works.
New people have none of the folklore, so whatever breaks for them in week one is exactly what the system actually requires versus what it merely documents. They are the only honest testers you’ll ever get for free.
What failing looks like
The signs are quiet. A training document that lives in one person’s head. A step that exists “because otherwise it duplicates the order”. A screen that’s fine, technically, but nobody trusts one specific button. Every one of these is software quietly outsourcing its design to whoever sits nearest — and the tax gets paid at every hire, every role change, every vacation.
Fixing toward the test
You don’t rewrite. You close the gap between what the system does and what it admits to. Labels that say what the field is for, not just its name. Guardrails on the dangerous clicks. The why written down where the action is, not in a wiki three clicks away. Defaults that match the common case, so the exceptional case is the only one that asks.
None of it is glamorous, and all of it compounds. Every fix that shrinks onboarding from two weeks to two days pays out on every future hire, forever.
Software your newest person can run is software your company actually owns. The rest is folklore with a login screen.
Working on something this applies to? Tell us about it — thirty minutes, no pitch.