An unexpected education
I did not come from a military background. Before joining Helsing, my understanding of military operations was roughly what you would get from news coverage and a few books. Since then, working closely with military operators and advisors has taught me more about systems design than a decade in consumer tech.
The most valuable lesson: feedback loops are everything.
The OODA loop and design
Military strategists talk about the OODA loop -- Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It is a framework for decision-making under uncertainty, developed by fighter pilot John Boyd. The idea is simple: the party that cycles through this loop faster than their adversary gains a decisive advantage.
What struck me is how directly this maps to product design:
- Observe: What information does the interface surface? How current is it? How trustworthy?
- Orient: How does the interface help the user contextualize what they are seeing? What frameworks and filters does it provide?
- Decide: How does the interface support decision-making? Does it present options clearly? Does it show tradeoffs?
- Act: How quickly can the user execute their decision? How much friction stands between intent and action?
Every screen you design is a loop. The question is whether it is a fast loop or a slow one.
What most products get wrong
Most products I have used -- and many I have designed -- optimize for individual steps in the loop while neglecting the loop itself. Beautiful data visualizations that do not connect to decision points. Decision interfaces that do not show the outcome of your choice. Action confirmations that do not feed back into updated observations.
The loop breaks. And broken loops mean slow decisions, repeated mistakes, and lost context.
Building complete loops
Here is what I now insist on in every feature we design:
- Close the loop visually. When a user takes an action, the interface must immediately reflect the consequence. No dead ends. No "your changes have been saved" banners that leave the user wondering what actually changed.
- Make feedback temporal. Show not just the current state but how the state changed as a result of the action. Before and after. Delta, not just absolute.
- Design for loop speed. Measure the time from observation to action. Then shorten it. Remove every unnecessary step, confirmation, and navigation event between seeing something and doing something about it.
- Enable learning across loops. The best interfaces help users recognize patterns over time. This means showing history, trends, and the relationship between past decisions and their outcomes.
The deeper insight
What the military really taught me is that a system's intelligence is not just in its algorithms. It is in the speed and quality of its feedback loops. The interface is the mechanism through which humans and AI systems learn from each other in real time.
Design that mechanism well, and the whole system gets smarter. Design it poorly, and the best AI in the world sits unused.
Speed the loop. Close the loop. That is the work.