Define, agree, automate

Three steps, and the order is the entire instrument.

Define. Write what the process is, in terms specific enough that two people following it separately would do the same thing. Marketing operations is unusually full of processes that exist only as habits, and a habit cannot be automated because there is nothing to encode.

Agree. Get the people who are affected to say the definition is right, before anything is built. Not consulted, agreed. This is the step that gets skipped, because it is slow and produces argument, and the argument is the value: it is happening now instead of after the tooling is in place and expensive to change.

Automate. Only now. What you automate is the agreed definition, not a technologist's reading of an undefined habit.

Doing it in the wrong order is one of the most reliable ways to make an operation worse. An automated process that nobody agreed does not fail loudly. It runs, produces defensible output, and quietly enforces one function's interpretation on everybody else at a speed no human process would have allowed. By the time the disagreement surfaces it is embedded in a system, and the conversation is about a migration rather than a definition.