Experiment
Find the Constraint
Automating the greatest number of tasks doesn't necessarily produce the greatest improvement.
Automate any step of a pipeline and watch what happens to the output. The important question is what's currently constraining the outcome.
The short version.
A pipeline moves only as fast as its slowest step. Speed up any other step and the work just piles up in front of the bottleneck.
So the first question isn't what can be automated. It's what's limiting the outcome right now. Fix that, measure, and the constraint moves somewhere else. Then find the next one.
Demo
Automate a step.
Each click on a step doubles what it can handle. The numbers are illustrative.
A recruiting pipeline
Illustrative numbers- Find candidates
- Make contact
- Screen
- Schedule
- Hand off
14candidates reach a recruiter per day
Each click on a step doubles what it can handle.
Find the constraint. Intervene. Measure. Then find the next one.
Build note.
A small build to answer one question.
- The question
- Does automating more steps of a process produce more output?
- What it does
- A five-step recruiting pipeline with an illustrative daily capacity at each step. Click a step to double its capacity and the output updates, along with a tally of what you've automated.
- What it shows
- Output only moves when you raise the slowest step. Raise it far enough and a different step becomes the constraint. Automating anything else adds work without adding output.
- Where it's used
- The same idea drives Dealer Flywheel: find where performance is actually lost before building anything.