Smallautomations,bigwins:startstupid,scalelater

Companies love to start automation with a strategy phase: vendor comparisons, capability matrices, a steering committee. Six months later there's a slide deck and nothing runs. Meanwhile someone in operations built a three-step flow that saves the team an hour a day, and it's been quietly running since week one.

Be the someone in operations. Pick a chore where the input is predictable and the failure mode is harmless: a new form submission lands in the right inbox with the right label, invoice data flows into the sheet, a weekly report assembles itself. Build it in an afternoon. Ugly is fine. Running beats elegant.

“Nobody was ever convinced by an automation roadmap. Everybody is convinced by their own Tuesday afternoon suddenly being free.”

Small wins do two things a strategy can't. They surface the real blockers early, while the stakes are still low: the missing API access, the data that turns out to be messier than anyone admitted. And they recruit believers: the colleague whose chore just vanished becomes your loudest advocate for the next build.

Scale comes later, and it comes naturally: once five small flows run reliably, patterns emerge, and only then is the platform conversation worth having, informed by what actually works instead of what a vendor demo promised.