Start with a strong manual process

Technology was designed to speed up human processes

At its core, tech makes things go faster, so what are you making go faster?

Before investing in technology, define how you are solving your human problem manually. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “slow down to speed up,” this is what we’re talking about.

You have to go slow - to get your process right - before you can layer on technology.

How one client’s manual process created a strong tech product

Our client plans events. When they came to us, they were fielding every phone call, holding clients' hands through the entire planning process, and managing everything in Excel.

They asked us to help them build a digital planning center, so families could sign up for their service and begin planning their events on their own.

With this new technology, families would be able to pre-populate event details, upload photos for the event, and detail their event preferences - all before a staff member would need to get involved.

Because they were planning events manually, they knew what a good process looked like. They did a great job of communicating that manual process to our team, so once we started to build their platform, we had a clear, shared understanding of what the platform needed to do.

The technology we built with them helped remove the bottleneck of an extremely manual planning process and now allows their team to serve more clients.

Is your technology solving your manual bottlenecks?

As you think about your business this week, is there a repetitive process in your company that requires a lot of your/your team's time?

See if you can identify a human process that can be automated.

When you’re ready to introduce technology to your process, a developer should deeply understand the human process you're automating before anything else. Then, you can work together to design a technical solution that replaces your manual process.

By having a clear understanding of your manual process and sharing that context with your developer, technology can remove manual bottlenecks, speed up your company's processes, and ultimately scale your company far past what you could do without it.