Guide
Which workflows to automate first: a checklist for small teams
October 30, 2026 · Written by the New Odyssey team, with AI help.
Every small team has a list of jobs that eat the week: copying details from one app to another, chasing the same approval, sending the same set of emails when a deal closes. The question is not whether to automate them. It is which ones to start with.
What makes a good first workflow
Look for a task that is:
- Repeated every week, or every time a certain thing happens.
- The same each time, with clear steps and few exceptions.
- Between apps, moving information from one place to another.
- Easy to check, so a wrong result is obvious.
- Easy to undo, so a mistake costs little.
An onboarding checklist sent when a deal closes meets all five. A refund decision meets none.
What to leave for a person
Some steps should always wait for a decision: spending money, writing to a customer for the first time, deleting something, or anything with legal or financial weight. A good workflow runs the routine steps and stops at the exceptions.
Write the job in plain words first
Before you build anything, describe the job in a few sentences: what starts it, what should happen, in what order, and when it should stop and ask someone. If you can't describe it clearly, a tool can't build it either.
Test on real data
Run the workflow on a few real examples before it runs on its own. Check the output against what a person would have done. Fix the differences, then run it on more.
Keep a record
For every run, you want to see what started it, what it did and what it decided. When something goes wrong, the record is how you find out why.
Review the exceptions
The goal is not zero human involvement. It is human attention only where it's needed. Review the exceptions weekly, and when you see the same one again and again, teach the workflow to handle it.
Where Steppa will fit
Steppa will build a workflow from a plain-English description across your apps, test it on real data, run it, keep a record of every run and ask you only for decisions. Steppa isn't built yet; join the early-access list to be invited as places open.
Questions
How do I know a task is worth automating?
If you or your team do it every week in the same way, it moves information between apps, and a mistake would be easy to spot and fix, it's a good candidate.
What should I never automate on its own?
Anything that spends money, contacts a customer for the first time or can't be undone. Let a person decide those.