Every ops team can relate to this image:
There’s the official process — the ticketing portal, the workflow diagram, the system leadership paid too much for. And then there’s the real process — the DMs, side threads, and “quick asks” that actually get the work done.
From a management perspective, it looks like everything’s running on the nice sidewalk. But in reality, everyone’s cutting through the grass — where work actually happens.
Thanks for reading.
Adam Smith
CEO & Founder, Wrangle
Key Takeaways
You can’t change how people work — only how you capture it.
The fastest path is usually the one people already take.
Visibility starts when you follow where the real work happens.
The Path Exists for a Reason
People don’t leave the sidewalk because they’re lazy. They leave because it’s faster and more natural.
Most ticketing systems force friction. You have to leave Slack, log into a portal, fill out a form, and hope someone sees it. So people just message the person they know.
That’s how you end up with hidden queues and invisible work. I’ve talked to IT managers that say, “We’re not handling that many tickets,” only to find out their team is drowning in Slack DMs — 30, 40, 50 per week that never get logged anywhere.
The problem isn’t that your people aren’t following the process. It’s that your process doesn’t follow your people.
Chat Is the Real System of Record
All those decisions — who approved something, why an exception was made, what actually got solved — don’t live in Jira or Zendesk anymore. They live in Slack and Teams.
Every conversation, every request, every fix is there because that’s where collaboration happens and context lives.
If your system of record doesn’t capture those conversations, it’s not really a system of record anymore.
Leadership thinks the dashboards tell the story. They can't. Not when they're missing critical context.
When you can see where work really happens, you can resource better, fix bottlenecks faster, and protect headcount when the budget talks start.
Stop Forcing A Path
You can’t change how people work. You can only meet them where they already are.
The best systems don’t force people onto the sidewalk. They recognize the path that’s already being used and make it easier to walk.
When work happens in chat, your goal shouldn’t to move it somewhere else — you should work to make it visible, measurable, and human.
Teams that do this see the full picture for the first time. The workload didn’t change, they’re just finally seeing all of it.
That’s exactly what Wrangle helps you do.
The worn path in the grass is the truth about how your company works. You don’t need to pave it over. You just need to see it.
Wrangle turns Slack and DM conversations into trackable tickets — automatically.
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