https://medium.com/@nedlowe/the-purpose-of-a-system-is-what…

“It’s not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me” — Batman. I always enjoyed this quote, as I find we can wrap ourselves up in bs trying to justify underlying motive, and not the actual outcomes.
I recently came across a systems version of this: “The purpose of a system is what it does”. I love it. Read that again and really let it sink in.
The purpose of a system is not necessarily what we wish it did, or what the original architect intended. The roadmap is irrelevant.
If a system is not truly used for anything, then it serves no purpose. Funding raised and good intentions do not count.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Does your system frustrate your users into giving up? Then that is the purpose. Is it supposed to be a reporting app, but people use it for extracting data to load into another application? Then that is the purpose.
If innovation is important to your organization, but products produced through the lab are not adopted, then the innovation lab is perhaps a marketing or recruiting tool. The purpose of a system is what it does.
In many ways, the Agile Manifesto’s “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” is a similar measure. Features that have not been released to production are not used. They are not the purpose of the software, however much we wish they were.
The same can be applied to your job. What tasks do you actually spend time on? The purpose of your job is what you do!