I Used To Automate Everything I Could

Reducing toil so people can focus on meaningful work is a noble goal. But I learned the hard way that "automate all the things" has some real drawbacks.

If a process generates bad results, automating it just makes the garbage come out faster.

And some of my automation efforts took significant time to develop and didn't justify the time they saved. It felt fun to code, but it wasn't delivering real value to the business.

The mindset shift for me was moving from "automate to save time" to "automate to lock in a good process." Don't automate something until you know it works well otherwise you're just scaling your mistakes.

The bigger realization was that my role wasn't to play with technology. I'm hired to solve business problems, within a team and often partnering with multiple departments. Sometimes that means automation and sometimes it means a checklist and a human.

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