The silent failure problem
Automations that “mostly work” are dangerous. A webhook fails overnight, enrichment stops, and sales keeps working from partial records for weeks.
Design checklist
- Idempotency: re-running a job should not duplicate CRM records.
- Retries with backoff for transient API errors.
- Dead-letter handling for poison messages.
- Alerting to a monitored channel with enough context to act.
- A named owner for each production workflow.
Start smaller than you think
Automate one painful handoff end-to-end — form to CRM to alert — before orchestrating a dozen apps. Reliability beats breadth. Document the happy path and the failure path the same day you ship.