🤖 What always goes wrong when you automate too soon

Rushing to automate Sales, Support or Finance flows? Automation could cost more than they save!

Yes, designers are responsible too! Especially in complex systems with many dependencies. If the workflow isn’t consistently designed, no amount of code will rescue it. Companies are rushing to automate internal workflows, especially in Sales and Support.

Automation sounds like a step forward. But during development (or worse, after launch), it hits: it can cost more than they save.

As a Product Designer focused on streamlining data-heavy workflows, I’ve seen (and made!) these three repeated mistakes:

1️⃣ No detailed workflow diagram

If you don’t have a step-by-step flow documented, you’re handing chaos to your dev team. You can’t offload PO or design responsibility onto engineers and expect them to "make it smarter". They might give helpful suggestions, but that’s not a substitute for discovery.

✍️ Example

We were planning to automate the Trust team’s process for handling reported users. Seemed simple. But after mapping the flow in detail, we discovered edge cases, like scammers hijacking real accounts. We postponed that branch for a future release and left the process manual due to the complexity of regulations.

2️⃣ The task isn’t frequent enough

If something happens once a month and humans manage it fine, or only a few people need it, do you really need to build a tool for it?

✍️ Example

We considered building a live preview tool for Marketing to visualize their outbound feed generation. But only a few people would use it. Meanwhile, we kept getting requests for more visibility into user data. Instead of adding endless columns, we'll let people create own custom data views.

3️⃣ Your tools don’t speak the same language

In Hubspot, it’s "Conversation". In Intercom, "Message Box". In your internal panel, "Customer" means someone who interacted with the product. But Finance only calls someone a customer after they pay. Automating on top of misaligned terminology just creates more confusion.
If terms don’t align, call your Copywriter before your Engineer.

⚠️ Automation for the sake of it can be the most expensive solution. Always leave room for human judgment and seamless handovers.