How to pick your first workflow
The first one sets whether anyone trusts the second. How to choose something that proves the idea instead of burying it.
Pick something that already annoys everyone
Not the most valuable process — the most resented one. Enthusiasm matters more than theoretical return on the first build, because the people around it decide whether it survives.
Pick something you can check at a glance
A good first workflow produces output a person can verify in seconds: a filed invoice, a drafted reply, a one-page summary. If checking the work takes as long as doing it, you have chosen badly.
Pick something that happens often
Daily beats weekly. You want enough repetitions in the first fortnight to find the edge cases while someone is still paying attention.
Keep the first one boring
The temptation is to start with the thing that would be most impressive. Resist it. The first build exists to establish that the machine does what it says, on time, without surprises. Impressive comes third or fourth, once the habit of trusting it exists.
Decide in advance what failure looks like
Before anything is built, write down what would make you call this a failure in six weeks. It is a short, useful conversation, and it stops a build drifting into something nobody asked for.
If you want this applied to your own shop rather than read in the abstract, send us the workflow and we will write back.