Building the Tool is the easy Part

In a previous post I mentioned a tool I built that helped reduce my co-worker's workload by a day. Here's the other part of the story and the reality of building tools for other people.

The initial wow factor was immediate, it showed to my co-workers and my boss that this type of workflow improvement was possible with the help of AI. But then we had to actually put it into production. What the demo bought me was buy-in, the hard part was executing.

On first actual production run with my co-worker I realized I had misunderstood parts of the workflow they described to me, and so we immediately hit friction. It didn't operate how they assumed it would and we ran into bugs because he wasn't following my thinking when executing the tool. I learned a hard lesson:

Building the Tool is the Easy Part -- Building a Tool for someone else is Hard

So we had to abandon the first run and I sat down with my co-worker to really drill down into what they do exactly, step by step, and once I really got the way they wanted to work then the tools naturally fell into place. They've since been using them on their own and have said it's even better than their wildest dreams.

I also built a set of tools for another co-worker on another project where I learned the same lesson.

It was a set of debugging tools that was designed around my thought process of how I would go about solving the given problem. And it was impressive because it made our project possible whereas we would have sunk excessive man hours on grunt work. But I didn't take into consideration the tech hurdle for my co-worker, and it took me an hour and a half just to walk through it, at the end they said "this is great but I wish it did this."

It was a novel idea I hadn't thought of because I thought it wasn't possible. But I asked Claude anyways and to my surprise we came up with a custom fit solution using parts of the scripting API that were too dense for me to learn in the past. And what we ended up coming up with was even better and fit how my co-worker wanted to work.

What I learned the hard way was that it's incredibly easy to build tools now, and things not buildable before due to time constraints are possible now -- which is really exciting! But its even more important now to consider WHO you are building your tools for, who is actually going to be using them, and does the tool actually serve them.

Original post: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/big-win-using-icm-cut-my-co-workers-manual-task-from-2-days-to-a-few-minutes-and-getting-an-upgrade-to-max

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