The problem with trying to automate all the things, and building automations on top of automations, is that you’re never taking anything away. You’re just building on top of layers of cruft. The value of removing complexity BEFORE automating is seriously undervalued.

52 Easy Manual Steps to Deploying

Once upon a time, I was tasked with removing a link on in our app.

It took almost all day to get this done. Ridiculous! I wrote it out to visualize it. I wanted to see the context switching necessary so I added which app or webpage you have to be in to complete that step.

It took 52 steps to delete a link and get it into production.

A link…

52 steps…

52 easy steps…

The 8th step was where the link was removed. This is the only step that involved editing code.

Every step after it was what it took to get it out the door, updating jira tickets, updating teams on slack, etc.

How much money does this place have??