DistributionCall fifty kindergartens before you add another mode
Turning Romanian bureaucracy into questions, plans, and a vault you can reuse
Faced with Tinder swipe, a rude counter bot, guest sessions, and a civic traffic goal, the room prescribed a smaller loop. Make a two-minute video for one type of organization, then call fifty of them in Timiș. The kindergarten that prefers a paper dossier for inspectors is not a UX nit. It is the buying criterion. If printing from the system costs her time, she will not pay to save parents time. That answer only shows up on the phone. Shipping another navigation mode postpones the only number that matters, how many of those fifty ask for a second conversation. Pick one customer that owns a procedure and exhaust the list before you invent a new way to tick a checkbox.
Related advice
Andrei GudiuEncode the counter as procedure plus scenario, not as a blog post
Andrei did not start from a CMS article about "how to register a car." He started from a physical board that already grouped cases, then noticed that nine to fourteen requirements collapsed to seven shared ones. That observation produced a compiler. A procedure plus a scenario creates a versioned JSON plan of questions, steps, fees, and documents. Each requirement records whether the user needs a copy, an original, or a legalized copy. A blog post goes stale when the counter reprints the board. A recipe can be cloned, versioned, and asked a new question. If you are digitizing a bureaucracy, model the counter's own categories before you write marketing copy. The panel is the schema. The article is the residue.
Andrei GudiuClone the ninety percent that is already the same
Andrei's builder treats transfer-of-registration and first-registration as cousins, not as two products. He clones the shared questions, steps, and fees, then overrides the labels and the required flags that actually differ, parents' IDs at kindergarten, motorcycle plates at 22 lei versus car plates at 56. That is cheaper than maintaining two trees that drift, and it is more honest than a single checklist that lies to half the room. The rule for any procedure product is to find the seven common requirements before you design the fourteenth unique one. Clone first. Override second. If a change to a question does not propagate, you do not have a system. You have a pile of copies.
Andrei GudiuAsk the question that prevents the wasted trip
The Dumbrăvița contract taught Andrei a cheaper product rule than another page of explanation. The town hall stamped a machine translation. The next counter wanted an authorized translation and the English original. The missing question was not "what is a translation." It was "did you already get this stamped," because that answer changes the bag you take tomorrow. Bureaucracy products fail by listing every document in the universe. They work by asking the fork that would have sent you home. If your checklist cannot change after a yes, it is a brochure. Put the expensive mistake, the fourth visit, the rejected copy, into a single required question and let the plan rewrite itself.
Andrei GudiuAsk for the exact value, not a category
Ask for the precise fact that deletes later questions. Exact age removes a tree of "under 14" follow-ups. A typed date is faster than a set of dropdowns for many people. The same rule applies to contextual requiredness. Ask for the raw value and let the plan hide the branches that do not apply.
Extracted from
Indie TM #15: Pick a Customer Before Another Feature