Stop Waiting for an Engineer and Automate It Yourself

You have, at your disposal, the ability to radically change the way you accomplish your daily work tasks, even if you don’t have an ounce of experience programming and writing code.

There has been an emergence of easily configurable software that you can use to automate your most frustrating, routine, yet necessary tasks. We talk about these tasks as inefficiencies in our workflows, and accrue them as a cost of doing business. Thanks to the technological innovations of the last decade, there is a much, much better way to handle these operational processes — a way that doesn’t require engineering resources.

Around October 2017, Managed by Q started to ramp up the supply side of its office services marketplace. Managed by Q is a platform that enables offices to build, design, staff and manage their workspaces. By partnering with local, trusted service providers we offer a wide range of office services to our clients through the Q Marketplace. We needed to end the year with 150 net new, vetted vendors who were capable of fulfilling an ever increasing demand for services on our platform. We definitely weren’t willing to compromise quality for quantity, which meant our complex vetting process — evaluating vendors on a few different dimensions across employment practices, insurance levels, testimonials, etc. — couldn’t simply go away in effort to speed up our acquisition rate.

Our Partner Acquisition team, the team responsible for onboarding new vendors to our platform, had been using a series of emails, spreadsheets, and notes to keep track of the vendors they were pursuing and onboarding. What worked fine when managing a handful of vendors a month was totally inadequate when managing closer to 50 a month.

As the product manager responsible for the success of this initiative, my first instinct was to turn to our engineering team to see what we could quickly build to facilitate a better onboarding process for our Partner Acquisition team. The only problem with that approach was that our engineering team was already committed to several unrelated, customer-focused features that were well along the way of development — features that had already been validated, and prioritized.

I was faced with a choice: advocate to pull engineers onto this project, sacrificing significant progress towards critical work, or come up with another way to meet our goals. Thankfully, I had a handful of configurable software tools in my toolkit. I’ve learned to use these tools to get us out of sticky situations before, which made me pretty confident in choosing the latter option.

I set out to design a solution using some of the tools I had at my disposal: Salesforce, Typeform, Slack, and Zapier. Salesforce was the CRM the team was using to manage their outreach, Typeform was used to capture prospective partners’ information, and Slack was the preferred notification system for the Partner Acquisition team. I also needed a way to connect all of these things, which is how Zapier comes into play. Zapier is a powerful web-based tool that lets you connect different systems through a simple interface, and 0 lines of code.

My goal was simple: create a vendor sourcing and onboarding workflow that was easy to manage, intuitive for internal and external users, and do it quickly.

Within a week we had…

• A vendor-facing qualification form that would create a Salesforce account profile upon completion
• A workflow in Salesforce to qualify leads and automate sending confirmations and denials to vendors
• A form to intake a vendor’s capabilities and locations they service, which would populate in Salesforce for our internal matching systems (we were previously entering this by hand)
• Slack notifications for updates on vendors’ submissions as a call to action for the Partner Acquisition team
• A COI/W9 uploader tool that attached vendors’ forms to their profiles in Salesforce and notified our finance team in Slack to process
• Structured data to track our progress to goal

…all without writing a single line of code.

We were able to jumpstart the team’s productivity just as we entered the last quarter of the year, fully equipped and prepared to meet our lofty goals. (Spoiler alert: We did, and then some.) We ended up onboarding about 180 vendors before January 1st and were well positioned to meet customer demand moving into 2018. 😅

This wasn’t just a one-off occurrence in which I used configurable software out of desperation. There is a plethora of problems to solve to up level our operations, and not all of the problems can be solved by our engineering team while continuing to deliver customer facing features. As a Product Manager at Managed by Q, I’m faced with daily opportunities to leverage configurable software to enhance our operations.

With these tools, I’m able to build things in minutes that engineering estimated would take 3–4 weeks of their time to build by writing code. All I have to do is click around in some drop-down menus, format some text boxes, and ta-da: business critical process implemented.

Some examples include:

Customer feedback collection, processing, and notifications

• Typeform, Slack, Salesforce, Zapier

Bug tracking and reporting system for our engineering teams

• Trello, Slack, Zapier

Employment verification requests

• Typeform, Google Docs, Email, Zapier

Requests for time off tracking and processing

• Typeform, Salesforce, Zapier

The accessibility of tools like Zapier and IFTTT, and even components of enterprise software like Salesforce and Hubspot, is a game changing opportunity for your business operations.

The time it takes to investigate and learn how to use these tools will pay dividends when you have an army of process “engineers” who can focus on the needs of their teams. Our product team instituted a monthly “learning day” dedicated to understanding configurable software. Try it! Use the links above as a starting point. Your teams will appreciate being given the space to learn a new skill set, and you’ll benefit from a competitive advantage that you could have only dreamed of having the budget for.

Ask yourself: If I had an extra engineering resource to fix an operational problem, what would I ask them to fix? Using these kinds of tools, you can have the power of an engineer without actually having to hire or re-prioritize one. It turns out, you can have your cake and automate it too.