In this interview, I talk with Justin Watt, the founder of Switchboard, a consultancy focused on automation solutions, about how his company helps businesses automate their processes and workflows.
Before founding Switchboard, Justin worked at IBM on large-scale government projects and at MetaLab with clients like Amazon and Uber. His experience in these roles, along with subsequent positions in Operations and IT leadership, has only deepened his passion for integrating technology with human collaboration.
Justin shares examples from his work with clients where he was able to automate everything from employee onboarding process to marketing campaign management. The conversation explores the benefits and challenges of automation and the trends in the field.
During the interview, Justin walks through a case study derived from automating the employee onboarding process for one of his clients, a fast-growing startup. Here is the Miro board he used for this client.
In this case study Justin talks about the challenges of automating employee onboarding process. Specifically:
- The process for getting alignment on what needs to be done
- Things that are easy to automate. I.e services with good API's
- Things that require upgrading to enterprise plans in order to automate
- How to work around legacy systems with poor API's
- Common issues include lack of process standardization and siloed data
- How he used tools like Airtable to centralize data and automate workflows, significantly reducing manual efforts and errors
- The quantitative and qualitative impact of automating onboarding at this company
Apart from the above Justin also talks about tools and trends in automation such as:
- Increasing use of AI and automation tools with expanded context windows and better API
- The growing use of tools like Clay and Airtable due to their flexibility in handling large datasets and integrating various data sources
- Importance of evaluating current tools and upgrading plans to unlock necessary features for automation
- Why good data infrastructure is essential for work process automation
