As a business grows, a series of manual processes spring up to cover all kinds of scenarios. Some of these will work their way into your core product via a typical Product and Engineering process. This is generally reserved towards work that has the most business value and/or customer impact. For all of the remaining manual work, as you scale, it’s important to automate as much as possible to increase your human leverage, reduce friction and errors, and allow people to take on new challenging work.
Here are some important considerations for automation before and during high growth phases.
First, you need make sure that any repetitive manual processes are well understand and can be performed by anyone. Start by fully documenting all of the human components, sometimes across teams, and shake out any tribal knowledge as you go. Really try to understand (and write down) what people are reviewing between steps, what decisions are being made, and other similar intangibles that are often left out of documentation.
Second, analyze all of the existing steps in the process to determine if they are all still worth doing. This is the most important part of the process. Over time processes tend to grow and grow to cover a lot of edge cases that may no longer be relevant but people don’t revisit the process and remove steps (or at least not often). Assess if there should be different steps or less steps to accomplish the same goal, and even consider if the entire process is still valid at all. You want to do this before any automation begins, because once a process is automated, it will be re-reviewed even less frequently. In other words, don’t automate something that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Third, before any talk of automation begins (since until now this is purely documenting and assessing), make sure your stakeholders see automation as a positive multiplier. People will be consciously or subconsciously afraid of their jobs, and with the wrong mentality around the benefits to them personally, they will get defensive and hold onto certain knowledge for job security. Make sure everyone knows there is other important work to do that will be more fun or challenging once these manual processes no longer take up as much of their time.
Forth, a couple important points about automation efforts that are often overlooked. When choosing a technology or platform to do the actual automation, try to avoid introducing new (or custom) languages to your internal tech teams to build in and maintain. The overhead to learn a new language is underestimated, it will be harder to hire people that know multiple languages, and it will frequently cause less cross-team collaboration to occur (as people won’t learn equally). Also, watch out for undocumented rate limits. These are never talked about in pre-sales discussions and data is never consistent, so whatever you choose must support usage spikes.