Hey Wranglers,
At my last company, there was a meeting that still haunts me. There were 20 people in the conference room.
Sales was there. Engineering. Managed services, Customer success. Product. Our CTO. Me.
We were there to fix our deal desk process: the system for approving custom deals, estimating project hours, and routing requests between teams was broken.
So we called a meeting.
I remember looking around that room halfway through and doing the math. If you added up everyone's hourly rate, we were burning about thousands per hour. We were in there for two hours. Then we scheduled follow-ups.
Ten grand, minimum. Probably more.
And we still had drops.
Thanks for reading.
Adam Smith
CEO & Founder, Wrangle
PS - The unsub URL is in the footer if you don’t want to hear from me/us anymore.
Key Takeaways
The process you document in meetings isn't the process people actually use.
Real decisions happen in Slack threads and DMs, not in your official workflow.
You can't fix a process you can't see.
Our Documented Process Wasn't the Process Anyone Actually Used
Yes, we documented a process in that meeting, but no one actually used it.
Instead, the real process looked like this:
Sales would ping someone they knew in engineering on Slack.
Engineering would ask CX to estimate hours via DM.
CX would loop in someone from data science through a side thread.
An exception would get approved somewhere along the way, maybe in Slack, maybe in a hallway conversation, maybe in another tool entirely.
By the time we tried to trace how a decision got made, the context was gone. The Slack thread was buried. The person who made the call had moved on. And we had zero record of why we did what we did.
So we couldn't learn from it. We couldn't train new people on it. We couldn't even reproduce it when the same situation came up again.
The process existed. It just wasn't happening where we thought it was.
Where Work Actually Happens
I see this all the time now with the teams we work with at Wrangle.
An IT director will tell me, "We handle about 150 tickets a month through our portal."
Then we turn on Wrangle and start capturing what's happening in Slack. Suddenly it's 500.
The work was always there. They just couldn't see it.
Because when someone needs help, they don't think, "Let me find the link to the IT portal, fill out a form, and wait for a response." They think, "Let me message Sarah. She'll know."
It's human and how we're wired to solve problems, but it's also invisible.
When someone asks, "How busy is your team?" you can only point to the logged tickets - not the 30 Slack requests you handled that week.
And when leadership is making decisions about headcount or priorities, they're basing it on incomplete information.
The System of Record Is Fiction
Every company has a "system of record" for tickets, deals, approvals, or whatever process they're trying to manage. It's supposed to be the single source of truth.
But in reality, the decisions are happening in Slack. The context is in Slack. The actual work is in Slack.
If you're not capturing that, your system of record is fiction.
At the company where we had the meeting, we tried routing deal desk requests through traditional tools. We built workflows. We integrated with Zapier.
Nothing stuck because the friction was too high. People worked around it.
That's why we built Wrangle. Not to force people onto some new process, but to meet them where they already are, and make that work visible, trackable, and useful.
You don't need another meeting to document the process. You need to see the process that's already happening.
And once you do, you can actually improve it.
The most expensive meetings are the ones that don't change anything.
Wrangle turns Slack conversations into trackable tickets - automatically.