The distance
Between what a business needs and what technology already allows.
The gap is almost never technical. The tools exist, they are affordable, and they already do more than almost anyone is asking of them. What is missing is the right question: who has the problem, what it costs them today, and what would have to be true for solving it to be worth the trouble.
The step almost nobody takes, because it means accepting the hunch could have been wrong.
Not automation for its own sake. First understand why the process exists, and whether it should go on existing.
The longest distance there is. You cross it with method, not with enthusiasm.
The method
Socrates did not teach. He asked.
His method started from an uncomfortable conviction: that the answer already exists inside whoever has the problem, and that the other party's job is to ask the questions that let it out. We apply that to building things.
Ask until it gets uncomfortable
The first answer is almost never the real one. The fourth or the fifth starts to be.
Separate the problem from the symptom
Almost everything that arrives described as a technology problem turns out to be a process problem wearing an expensive costume.
Build the smallest thing that proves something
Not a handsome prototype. The smallest piece that turns a hypothesis into a fact.
Measure, and accept the result
Even when it says the idea was bad. Especially then: it is the only part of the process that actually produces information.
If you read this far, you probably have a question.
That is exactly where this starts.
That copies the address. Or open it in your mail client.
Pablo Alejandro López Sánchez
Data and automation engineer
poglolopez@gmail.com