Douglass North

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The rule I enforced least was the one that mattered most.

I had a hundred rules for my engineering team. Code review standards. Deployment checklists. Security protocols. Testing requirements before anything touched production. These rules were real. They had teeth. Violate them and you heard about it. They worked because someone — me, a lead, a system — would catch you if you cut corners.

But the rule I cared about most deeply — build things that genuinely serve the people who use them — had no enforcement mechanism at all. It lived in my head. Sometimes I said it in meetings. Nobody checked. Nobody measured it. Nobody got called into a room for shipping something that technically worked but quietly made a user's life worse. The rule existed