The foundation of pretty much anything that we do relies on 3 things; Tools, Processes & People.
Invariably, when we work on something new (e.g. professionalizing our marketing, or building a DevOps team), we go through the same motions;
- At first, we rely on people to go out there, get things started and figure it out. It often is a single person.
- As we understand things better, we start outlining processes. Ultimately, we want these to be captured in this very playbook, but it often starts as a collection of Hackpad documents.
- The final step is usually to leverage tools to try and automate ourselves out of things. Sometimes we use existing tools, sometimes we build our own, sometimes we glue a few things together using Zapier.
There’s an obvious incentive to invest into automation & tools over time, and processes as an alternative, rather than people (because being lazy is being smart). Your goal should be to free yourself from manual and repetitive work and design a method for the rest. This not only makes your job easier but ensures that you can share responsibilities or even delegate them.