When someone hands me a process to automate, the first thing I do isn’t figure out how to build it. It’s figure out how much of it I can ignore.
That sounds backwards. Most people scope a project by cataloging everything it has to handle — every case, every exception, every “but sometimes.” The list gets long, the timeline gets long with it, and the whole thing collapses under its own completeness.
Here’s what years of this have taught me. Almost every real process follows a power law. A handful of case types drive the overwhelming majority of the volume, and a long tail of edge cases feels important but barely moves the needle. The instinct is to treat them all as equal. They are not.
So before I design anything, I map the volume. Which cases actually happen, and how often. Nine times out of ten, a small set covers most of the work, and the rest is noise dressed up as requirements.
Then I build for the vital few and route the tail to a human. You cover the bulk of the real work with a fraction of the effort — and you ship while everyone else is still arguing about edge cases that happen twice a year.
This is also how you hit a deadline everyone called impossible. Not by working faster. By refusing to build what doesn’t matter, and by changing the scoreboard from “how many features did we ship” to “how much of the actual volume do we cover.”
The analysis is the easy part. The hard part is having the nerve to tell a room full of stakeholders you’re deliberately not building most of what they asked for — and being right.
That’s the value. Anyone can scope a project up. The senior move is scoping it down, on purpose, and standing behind it.