# Resilient Systems · Jose Romero

The best process does not depend on one person to remember it. How a principle-first working system held up at IKEA Home Services.

Source: https://www.joseromerodesign.com/thinking/positions/resilient-systems/

Resilient Systems

# The best process is one that doesn't depend on any single person to remember it.

Published June 2026 · Updated October 2026

When I joined the IKEA Home Services team, there was no shared working system. Files existed everywhere. The hierarchy of work, what belonged in Figma, what in Confluence, what in Jira, was unclear and inconsistently applied. The process that existed depended on specific individuals to hold it in memory and transmit it informally. When those individuals weren't available, the system collapsed.

My approach was to start with principles rather than tools. I mapped the actual work the team was doing: the types of tasks, their interdependencies, the decisions that kept getting lost. From that, I derived a set of structural rules, what goes where, when, and why, that could be documented, taught, and modified without requiring me to be present.

Adoption was messy, honestly, but the underlying structure held up regardless. That's what I was aiming for: a process solid enough to keep working when people don't follow it to the letter. It's already outlived changes in the team, a round of new hires, and the stretches where nobody had time to babysit it. That's the real test, and it passed.

_A good system keeps working when people don't follow it perfectly._

## Other positions

- Positional Empathy In enterprise work, the empathy that moves projects forward is positional.

- Behavioural Economics Most design decisions are really behavioural decisions wearing a visual disguise.

- AI & Design Practice AI has changed how much of a design job is thinking versus doing, more than most people have noticed.

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