/ Propel26 · San Francisco · May 2026
Design Before You Automate
Most implementation functions weren't designed for the customer. They were designed for the team running them. That's where it breaks — and it's also where AI adoption stalls. These were the three principles I used to fix it.
These didn't come from adding AI. They came from fixing the design before touching automation.
Pull up any step in your implementation process. Run it through these questions.
- Is the customer being asked to figure something out you already know?
- Are they waiting on guidance that should have been given proactively?
- If this step failed, who would feel it most: you or them?
If the honest answer is that the step protects your execution more than it delivers their outcome, that's your first signal. All the right effort, wrong starting point.
Not what the step produces internally. Not what gets checked off. What does the customer feel, know, or become able to do because this step happened? If you can't answer that clearly, the step isn't designed for the customer yet.
Assume you have to absorb everything currently sitting with the customer. All of it. Then ask:
- How would we solve this if it was entirely our responsibility?
- Where could we pre-build, pre-answer, or pre-solve instead of waiting?
- Where are we project managing when we should be advising?
Walk it back only where you genuinely can't solve it yet. That gap is your build list.
In your kickoffs and touchpoints, which describes how you show up?
That shift, from coordinator to advisor, is the whole game. It changes what customers expect, and what they trust you with.
Most teams introduce AI before they understand what their processes are actually doing. The result isn't efficiency; it's faster confusion. AI didn’t find its home in our implementation until we knew our process well enough to know where it didn’t belong. Here’s the filter we used.
START HERE: Is it customer-facing?
THEN ASK: Is it high effort and repeated?
LAST: Is it accurately defined?
List your top 10 implementation activities. Place each one: AI Driven, AI Assistance, or Human Only?
- →Where humans are doing AI Driven work: that’s your first automation opportunity
- →Where Human Only work has already been automated: that’s your first quality risk
- →Where AI Assistance could extend your team but hasn’t: that’s your next build priority
Efficiency followed. We didn’t chase it. We earned it.
AI amplifies what you give it. If your process isn’t clear, you’re just making the confusion faster.
This came from 18 months of rebuilding Zappi’s implementation function from scratch — starting with customer outcomes, not internal efficiency. If you want to go deeper or talk through how this applies to your team, find me on LinkedIn.