What Makes a Good First Workflow

The people, companies and numbers in this course are made up so the arithmetic stays clean. Replace them with your own before you rely on any of it.

A first project should be a workflow, not an agent. A workflow follows steps you wrote down and tested. An agent chooses its own steps, which is harder to check and not where to start. You'll build the first kind.

A good first workflow is boring. It happens often, takes a person ten to thirty minutes each time, follows a pattern you can describe, and does little harm when it's wrong once in a while.

The Safety Rule Comes First

Low-risk failure is required. If a mistake could cost money, expose data or damage trust, redesign the task as a private draft that a person reviews before you score it. Then score all four checks.

Score Each Candidate

• Frequency: it happens at least weekly. 1 point.
• Pattern: you can explain the steps to a new hire in five minutes. 1 point.
• Safe failure: a wrong output costs minutes, not money or trust, or it only ever lands in a private draft. 1 point.
• Clear input: the starting material lives in one or two places. 1 point.

How to Read the Score

Score each task out of 4. A task that gets no point for safe failure isn't a first project, whatever its total. A 3 or 4 with safe failure is a good place to start. A 2 or below can wait.

Worked Example (Made-Up Numbers)

Dana runs a small design studio. Every Friday she spends 25 minutes drafting a client status email from project notes. It happens weekly (1), follows the same four parts (1), lands in her drafts folder where she reads it first (1), and the notes live in one doc (1). That's 4 out of 4. Her idea to auto-reply to new sales inquiries scores 2: it happens weekly (1) and the inquiry arrives in one inbox (1), but every reply is different (0) and a wrong answer could lose a client (0). She starts with the status email. The sales idea can come back later as private drafts a person reviews.

Common Mistakes

• Picking the most exciting task instead of the most repeatable one.
• Starting with something customer-facing and high stakes.
• Choosing a task you can't describe step by step.

Exercise

Score three candidates in a table with the four checks as columns. Write one sentence for the winner: what starts it, what comes out, who reads it.