← Benjamin J. Sunter 1 minute
Operating notes

The smallest ask that works

Benjamin J. Sunter · Sep 2026

Early on I built intake the way I needed it rather than the way anyone would fill it in.

I have seen a support request form run past a dozen pages, asking about the ask, the person, the account and everything else under the sun, where half of what it collected was never read by the person processing the request. It was there in case someone needed it. This was at Google, where the CRM already held most of those answers.

THE FORM I BUILT42 fields, twelve pagesread by the person processing the requestcollected in case somebody needed itTHE FORM NOWAccount ID. Everything else populates itself.
Every field costs somebody thirty seconds. Multiply that by everyone who ever files a request, then compare it to how often the answer gets looked at.

Those forms did not get adopted, and for a while I put that down to the stakeholders.

It was mine. I was asking people to type things because I could not pull them myself, so my skill ceiling turned into their overhead.

Now the ask is the smallest one that still works. An account ID, and the rest populates from the records system. The only free text left is the thing no system holds, like whether there is history with a partner worth knowing before you walk in.

Learning to query the data myself was less about the analysis than about not making twenty other people pay for what I could not do.