The Automation Fallacy: Why Writing Reports Is More Important Than Reading Them
If you focus too much on amplifying your outputs, you might hit a hard limit to your desired outcomes.
During my tenure as the head of growth for a major tech enterprise, I oversaw the expansion of a product that catered to a vast customer base. The product had already amassed millions of users and continued attracting new customers every week. My primary responsibility was to convert most of these new users from the free version of the product to its premium offering.
Every Monday, I collected the business results relative to the previous week, neatly arranging the critical figures in a brief report and publishing an internal memo to the stakeholders. The whole process took me a couple of hours, and every time I had to do it from scratch, assembling the information from at least five data sources.
At some point, our data team deployed an internal analytics tool that collected all the data from all our sources. I invested a few days in learning this new technology deeply, and off I went to build a script that was building the report for me and publishing it automatically.
It was fantastic, and with just a few hours invested in building this automation, I could save two hours every week, reaching peak efficiency.
However, in a matter of a few weeks, something terrible happened.
The product I was working on stopped growing.
We still had the incoming traffic, and we still had people taking advantage of the free offering. However, fewer people were purchasing the premium offer, and our business performance started to fall in the red.
We started scrambling, and many emergency meetings popped up on our calendars. The head of the business unit got involved, and we struggled for a while.
I remember those weeks as a challenging time when I felt I was missing the grasp on something, but I was quite not sure what.
Until we started tracing back, I realized that the fall had started just two weeks after I had automated my reporting process.
And there, in the middle of the storm, it came to me: the problem was… “ME”.
As long as I invested two hours every week putting numbers together to publish my report, I had all the most essential figures in front of me and on top of my head at all times. Those two hours felt tedious at times, but they gave me the business clarity I needed to make informed decisions throughout the rest of the weeks.
Since I automated the process, limiting myself to casually checking the report autogenerated by my precious scripts, I knew the business trends. Still, I missed the needed investment to use them effectively in my day-to-day processes.
I reverted to manual reporting, and in a month or so, we returned to growing our business.
Automation is a fascinating spell in the toolbox of a manager. It can reduce costs and amplify outputs, sometimes by tens or hundreds.
However, it comes at a cost, not necessarily the time and resources you need to write a script or a more sophisticated tool. The actual cost lies in the distance that grows between the decision-makers and the information they need to be adequately informed.
If you focus too much on amplifying your outputs, you might hit a hard limit to your desired outcomes.
An effective manager can automate most of their processes but also knows which ones need to be intentionally hand-made, heart-made, and brain-made to stay true to their purpose and achieve the maximum outcome, regardless of having a sub-optimal output.