Spotting the Grunt Work Nobody Had Named Yet
How a conversation with a solutions engineer surfaced a workflow worth automating, and getting the right people together to build it
The situation
POVs were eating up a disproportionate amount of an SE's time, on the same repetitive, low-judgment steps every time. Nobody had explicitly flagged this as a problem worth solving, it was just accepted as part of the job, the kind of grunt work that doesn't get automated because nobody's stopped to name it as automatable.
What I did
Listening for the real problem, not just the request
Talking directly with the SE surfaced it, not because they asked for an automation, but because the pattern was obvious once I asked what was actually eating their time. This is where the workflow-discovery instinct matters most: the fix isn't always requested, it has to be noticed.
Connecting the right people instead of trying to build it myself
Rather than attempt the technical build on my own, I got the SE working directly with a developer, pairing the person who knew the workflow's pain points with someone who could actually implement a fix. My role was making that connection happen and keeping the collaboration focused on the real problem, not just a generic automation.
The result
A workflow that had been quietly costing time for a long time is now on a real path toward automation, built by the person who understood the SE's actual day-to-day, not a solution designed in isolation. This one's still in motion, results and hard numbers to come as the implementation lands.