Chapter 6: Slack for Physical Things
Systems track every metric of success while remaining blind to the human cost of achieving them.
By Ryan Stephen is a former Director of Design at Sortly, Inc. Background in evolutionary biology, chemistry, and product design. These essays use one company to examine what organizations lose when they stop being able to hear the people inside them, and no one asks why.
When Perception Separates
Vision from Reality
It’s October 2024 and I’m walking back to the hotel too fast. Not exactly running, but fast enough that my body feels like it’s trying to put distance between itself and something it can’t name. San Francisco is doing its Fall magic trick, dry air and thin light, everything dipped in gold. I should be looking at the sunset but I’m staring at my phone.
Slack is open. My thumbs hover over a message to my design team.
“This is the most unique company I’ve ever encountered. There will be a book written about this place.”
My thumbs just hang there because I can feel the code-switch happening. Vague reads as safe. Cryptic reads as intentional. A neat trick, if you ignore the fact that it’s a fear response.
The honest line never makes it onto the screen.
“And I don’t know if it’s a biography or an autopsy.”
The last year and a half, meaning kept sliding the moment anyone tried to pin it down. Direction changed depending on who spoke last. Reality quietly moving its own goalposts, everyone acting like the goalposts had always been there.
Also, small detail, huge detail, I’m getting married in three weeks.
I should be thinking about vows and guest lists. Instead I’m mentally rewinding the afternoon like security footage, trying to make my brain accept that what I heard is real.
My brain keeps returning to the same place. A ten-year-old company, and this is the pattern it settled into. I had taken the job for craft and collaboration, the quiet joy of building with people who actually care about design. The trade turned out to be built on a translation error. Same words, different meanings. I had been watching the pattern for over a year without being able to categorize it, technically the inverse of an evolutionary one because it wasn’t based on survival. My brain tries to stay fair. Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe I’m overreacting. The other possibility is harder to hold.
I reach the hotel lobby still buzzing because my nervous system doesn’t care that the meeting is over. My thoughts do what they always do when the environment shifts. They go to the team. There was a new designer starting their first day that morning, the same day I flew out for this emergency meeting because of another leadership transition. What am I bringing them into. What have I walked into myself.
And underneath all of it, there’s this strange feeling that won’t leave me alone.
I’m in the right place.
My side gig used to be designing founder pitch decks, lots of them. I know how to take a vision and give it edges, constraints, a shape you can put in front of investors. I was good at it because I’m a skeptic. I didn’t believe in their vision, I just had to believe in my ability to make it coherent by connecting dots. More than once, my pitch deck caused a company rebrand.
What I saw in that room wasn’t anything I could put in a pitch deck. The vision was brilliant and incredibly disruptive, but in the way that makes reality seem upside down. Ambiguous enough that you couldn’t debate it, the same way you can’t debate the value of null or measure infinity. It exists in a cloud. I had spent a year watching what happened to people who tried to reach into it. The meeting gave the pattern a shape I had only previously hypothesized.
The System
I left in July 2025. When you live inside a system where meaning slides around, your body stays braced for the next reframe, the next quick sync that changes what yesterday meant. What I developed working inside Sortly was a kind of environmental pattern recognition I didn’t ask for. After ten minutes in a meeting I could sense whether it was built on actual decisions or performance, whether words meant what they said or had been sanded down to survive the next forwarding.
The higher you sat, the more the company looked like a clean set of numbers. The lower you sat, the more it felt like guessing which version of reality would still be true by Friday. Two separate channels carrying different signals. The instrument had become the most efficient way the system understood itself.
The language was always careful, frictionless enough to avoid the weight that forces change. Words became foam padding. I do not want to villainize anyone because I do not think most of it was intentional. What interests me is what happens when a system builds two realities that never touch. The people at the controls receive one feed while the people living with the consequences receive another. In a system without shared definitions and two-way channels, that gap is not a miscommunication. It is the architecture working as designed.
When you build an environment where the official version is tidy and the lived version is messy, and then you reward the tidy one, people adapt. They learn which questions generate heat instead of answers. They learn to translate their thoughts into something that can survive being forwarded. This is selection pressure, and it runs on systemic repetition rather than any single villain.
A system can be successful by its own metrics while training the people inside it to stop trusting their own read on what is real.
The stated product vision was the kind of aspirational Silicon Valley shorthand that sounds like a strategy until you try to act on it. “Slack for Physical Things.” It was not on the website and it was not built into any public language, which starts to make sense when you visit the about page and find no vision there at all, no mission, no origin story, just a feature list and a metrics block for a decade-old company. The phrase did not translate into requirements that teams could execute against, partly because no one could define it coherently enough to try. Ashwin Kumar explains why calling your startup the “X for Y” can be problematic for buy in. From a high altitude that kind of flexibility looks strategic. On the ground, where people are trying to turn words into software, it acts like white noise.
A soft vision can mean whatever it needs to mean in any meeting. The ambiguity was not necessarily deliberate but it served a purpose regardless of intent. The phrase existed somewhere above the product, in the register of aspiration, useful for conversations with investors and agencies, not particularly useful for the people who had to ship something by Thursday.
Designers are trained to read absence as much as presence. Negative space has meaning. The phrase wasn’t missing a definition. It was the definition, just pointed at the wrong thing.
The product itself organizes the physical world into two fundamental categories. Assets are high-value items tracked carefully over time, things the system monitors, maintains, and accounts for with some permanence. Consumables are different. They get bought, used, and replaced. The system treats them accordingly.
Sortly is a remote-first company so there is no physical office. The human interface of the company was purely digital, which means in a fully remote environment the digital avatar is the person. There is no watercooler, no empty desk, no missing coat on a hook to signal that something has changed.
I worked alongside people for months without meeting them in person. Our entire working relationship was pixels, full color gamut while they were employed and fifty shades of gray when they were not. Departures were not always announced. They arrived as absence, a quieter meeting, a person-shaped gap where institutional knowledge used to be. Transitions were not always obvious because the gap simply closed around itself while the work kept moving forward. The system stayed efficient while the cost lived somewhere the system could not see.
Most people found out about a departure when they tried to send someone a message in Slack and the account was already deactivated. The inventory had been updated. The item was simply no longer in stock.
In an interview with the App Masters Podcast, the founder mentioned that his biggest lesson was developing patience because dreams do not always happen on your timeline. It is a classic founder sentiment and it describes a real thing. For those of us building the product though, the vision had already been achieved, shipped, and tested. We were living in the future he was still waiting for, and had been for a while.
The psychological cost of this architecture on individual contributors and managers is real and cumulative. You gradually stop optimizing for craft and start optimizing for not being the next gray avatar in Slack. Leadership did not see the anxiety or the hypervigilance because dashboards do not have a column for the energy required to perform stability while the ground moves. Official channels said morale was manageable. The weight people carried outside of work told a different story.
The Inversion
The phrase was “Slack for Physical Things.” It was supposed to describe the product.
The more I watched how the company operated, the more clearly it described something else. People and institutional memory moved through the system with the same transactional efficiency the product promised for physical inventory. You could track who was in-stock and out-of-stock by watching Slack avatars change color. Gray meant someone was gone, the way a product listing goes quiet when it has been discontinued. The company had built a tool to help people communicate about what mattered most to them. The system was consistent.
“Slack for Physical Things” more accurately described the company culture than the product vision.
The direct version of this conversation was not available to me. Raising inconsistencies between the product and its marketing had a pattern of generating friction rather than clarity, and I had learned what it cost to press on things the environment wasn’t built to metabolize. Holding in that level of irony and contradiction long-term makes communication a design problem to solve. So I went up a level in scope. If I couldn’t address the vision directly, I could reframe it from the outside in.
I had started working on a translation but nothing spectacular. The most basic function of an inventory system is that it helps you communicate about what matters most to you or your organization. Lightbulbs, half-inch screws, toilet paper, batteries. Assets too, though assets do not turn over at the same rate. The question was how to design a translation that could encompass both the culture and the product vision at the same time.
“Communication for Meaningful Things” was where I landed. It connected the product problem and the culture problem until they became the same issue. I had been unable to communicate meaningful things directly inside the company, and that was exactly what the product was supposed to enable for its users. My limitation as a person inside the system matched the limitation of the customers the product served. A company that could not hear its own employees had built a tool for people who needed to be heard about what they valued. After I left I posted a version of this observation in a Glassdoor review, before I had the distance to structure it as an argument. The original vision was simply pointed at the wrong layer.
What I watched happen at human speed inside one organization is about to happen everywhere, with less visible friction. AI is exceptionally good at what organizations are already tempted to do. It compresses narratives into bullet points and turns lived experience into key themes, which makes meaning clean enough to call it alignment. What you lose in that compression is the pause before an answer, the willingness to ask why before moving on, the question that was redirected instead of addressed, the half-second of hesitation that tells you someone is translating their real thought into something survivable. Those are the moments where meaning lives, and in a system optimizing for efficiency, they are the first things to go.
Once a competitor learns to eliminate the human signal and maximize output, the rest of the industry follows. The data gets cleaner at the top while the people at the bottom accumulate fragments of context that no longer connect into a coherent picture of what is actually happening. A vision that only makes sense from altitude becomes harder to question the further it travels from where it was made, and the cost of that distance doesn’t show up in the dashboard but in the lives of the people who have to execute against it.
The Sortly product has a built-in Price field but no built-in Cost field. Cost exists as a user-defined custom field, but the system cannot calculate it, it just sits in a text box the architecture was never built to use. The system knows what things are worth but has no native way to account for what they cost, and the human cost of how a company operates works the same way, a value people keep entering into a field the organism was never built to metabolize.
This essay is part of a series on design, communication, and the future of work. Writing plainly about how organizations actually work invites attention. If you'd like to support the project, you can contribute to the 451 Firewall Fund. Read the full collection on Substack and Medium. The companion project lives at helloyouexperiment.com.