Automating a workflow without breaking the team's trust in it

The fastest way to kill an automation project is to ship something that's right 95% of the time with no visibility into the other 5%. People don't trust systems they can't audit, and they shouldn't have to.

Every automation I build ships with a way to see what happened and why — a log, a dashboard, a Slack message with reasoning attached. It's not extra scope; it's the thing that makes the automation usable on day one instead of week twelve.

Start narrow, make the failure cases visible, and let the team's trust grow with the system's track record.