Overview
What this was
AI could clearly speed up a marketing workflow. The open question was whether the people closest to the work could identify, build, validate, operate, and improve those workflows themselves.
- Designed the cohort sequence and the work-based assessment
- Facilitated live instruction on workflow decomposition, context design, and Claude Projects
- Coached the builds between sessions and ran calibration
- Handed ownership, maintenance, and the executive presentation to the Super Users
The system
Diagnosis, build, and how it ran
The constraint
A marketing team was spending recurring hours on assembly work: the same collection, formatting, and drafting steps every cycle, and more of them in months with an opening. Automating one of those workflows myself would have solved one workflow and created a permanent dependency on me for the next one.
Success meant two people could explain, operate, maintain, and extend the workflow themselves.
The sequence
The capability journey
Select a stage to see what it had to produce.
The work was the assessment
The final session tested four capabilities, each against something the participant had actually built:
- Diagnose: what should be automated, and what should stay human?
- Build: can they create and refine the workflow?
- Validate: can they find failure cases and tell plausible output from usable output?
- Own: can they run, maintain, teach, and extend it independently?
16 hrs/mo
Capacity returned, months without openings
32 hrs/mo
Capacity returned, months with 1–2 openings
2
Local builders maintaining and extending the work
2 weeks
Pre-work through handoff
I report the two operating conditions separately as hours of capacity returned, using the participant-tracked time for each condition.
What was actually transferred
The scale loop
- Spot
- Map
- Build
- Ship
- Teach
- repeats inside the department
The loop runs inside the department. The people who own the work spot, map, and build the next candidate workflow, and the Super Users teach the next person.
A successful pilot ends with less dependence on the person who launched it.
The durable result was a department with the capability to build the next workflow itself.
Measurement
What changed
16 hrs/mo
Capacity returned in months without new-store openings
32 hrs/mo
Capacity returned in months with one to two openings
2
Local builders able to maintain and extend the workflows
2 weeks
Pre-work through handoff