Automation isn’t the goal — leverage is
Founders sometimes treat automation as an end in itself. The more things automated, the better. The team competes on how many manual steps they’ve removed.
Automation is useful. It’s also overused. Automation that doesn’t actually save time, or that introduces fragility, or that hides important context from the team, can be worse than the manual process it replaced.
The right way to think about automation is as leverage. You want automation where it produces real time savings, removes routine work that wasn’t adding value, and lets the team focus on more useful things. Anywhere it doesn’t do those things, manual work is probably fine.
When automation makes sense
A few signals suggest automation is worth investing in.
- The work happens often. Daily or ...
