Most businesses don’t have a technology problem. They have a problem they haven’t understood yet, and a subscription they bought hoping it would go away.
You know the pattern. Something is slow, so we automate it. Customers are confused, so we add a chatbot. The team is drowning in admin, so we buy another platform. Sales are flat, so we install a new CRM.
Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it makes the problem worse, and now you’re paying monthly for the privilege.
I’ve seen businesses pay hundreds of thousands, if not millions, for subpar tech that then had to be customised to do what they needed. One bought a 6-figure CRM, then spent another 6 figures making it usable. More often than not, someone who wasn’t qualified to make that call made it, and then the sunk cost fallacy kicked in.
I say this as someone who loves technology. I build businesses with it, I use AI constantly, and I’m usually the person asking “could we automate this?” But another question has to come first: should we be doing this at all?
A faster broken process is still a broken process
The biggest mistake I see is automating something before asking whether it should exist.
Say you have a 12-step process that takes 3 days. You could find software that automates a few of those steps and gets it down to 1 day. Great. Except the better question was why there are 12 steps.
Maybe 6 exist because of a decision someone made 5 years ago. Maybe 2 are duplicate checks. Maybe 3 different systems collect the same information, and nobody reads the report at the end.
I spent 20+ years in corporate operations asking that question. I led the Kaizen initiative for a Big 4 financial institution’s wealth operations, and we saved $1m in 12 months. We got there through small, incremental changes. One was cutting a form from 16 pages to 4, which reduced print costs, cut the number of enquiries into the contact centre, made it easier for the ops teams to process and improved the customer experience. We had hundreds of micro moments like that, and not one of them came from new technology.
The clever part is rarely the technology. It’s understanding the process well enough to see you can redesign it.
Sometimes the fix is boring
Sometimes the best solution to a business problem has nothing to do with technology. Rewrite the instructions, remove an approval, change who owns the task, stop producing the report, call the customer, or delete half the process.
None of that is exciting, and none of it makes a good LinkedIn post about digital transformation. It might solve the problem, though.
Good business improvement means building the simplest system that reliably gets the outcome you need. Sometimes that’s sophisticated technology. Sometimes it’s a spreadsheet. Sometimes it’s a Post-it note on the wall that says STOP DOING THIS.
Technology scales whatever you give it
Technology is brilliant at scale, and scale works in both directions.
Automate a great customer journey thoughtfully and you can serve thousands more people without wrecking the experience. Automate a terrible one and, congratulations, you can now annoy thousands of people much more efficiently.
AI is no different. Give it a clear process, good context and sensible guardrails and it’s incredibly useful. Give it a chaotic process nobody understands and you’ve added another participant to the chaos.
That’s because a business is a system, and the apps are only one part of it. Your pricing affects your sales process, your sales process affects your workload, and your workload affects your team. Change any part and something shifts somewhere else, which is why “what tool should we use?” is never the first question.
Knowing what’s worth building
The technical barriers to building things are disappearing fast. You can create websites, workflows, software and automations in a fraction of the time it used to take, and I think that’s incredible.
It also changes what’s valuable. When everyone has tools that can build almost anything, knowing how to build matters less. Knowing what’s worth building matters more: understanding the customer, defining the problem, seeing the whole system and challenging the assumptions inside it.
The order is problem, process, people, technology. The other way round is shiny new technology, followed by a desperate search for somewhere to use it.
So start with the friction. Where are people wasting time? Where are customers getting stuck? Where are you solving the same problem over and over?
Work that out first. Then open the toolbox.
If you want help working out what’s worth building, check out my community. It’s where we build it, launch it and make it better.