I love working on tooling and automations for teams, detecting patterns, finding complex processes that can be simplified. I saw the real-life impact that those small processes, when optimizations start piling up, has on a support team. It can be a true game changer.
And here’s something that keeps coming up for me: it’s not about the tools themselves, it’s about the processes they improve. We can get caught up in creating new tools all the time, prettier, cooler, fancier… but what actually matters, and what really moves the needle, is how we optimize the little things we do every day:
Tooling is not just about tools, is about making our team lives easier by making our processes faster, safer, and accessible to more teammates.
A simple example
Let’s say we have Process A, a troubleshooting method we use often.
- Manual Process A:
- Takes 15 minutes, requires WP Admin + FTP access
- Only doable by more technical teammates
- Easy to mess up (because who hasn’t struggled with manual logs?)
- We do it maybe 10 times a month because it’s annoying
You identified it as a procecss, so then you automate it:
- Automated Process A:
- Takes 1 minute, requires only WP Admin access
- Anyone on the team can do it
- Won’t fail
- We now use it 50 times a month because it’s easier
See what happens? Same process, different experience. Suddenly, we’re more efficient, we rely less on senior teammates for stuff, and we deliver more value. That’s the power of tooling when it’s focused on processes.
A real-life example from day-to-day cases: Who’s clearing the cache!
In WP Rocket Support team, we had a manual process to “Detect who is triggering Full cache cleanups”. Sometimes, the site cache is cleared multiple times by 3rd party plugins, functions, etc. That put stress on the server, and is important for the team to detect who is the culprit!
Before: It used to be a 20-minute Tier2 task. and quite advanced, but standardized to some exent: We required WP Admin and FTP access, the process involved navigating to specific files via FTP, adding logs to core plugin files in specific places, waiting for log files to appear, search for the log which can be hard, as paths can change!), detect the trigger of the action, then do the cleanuo: remove the error_logs, remove the log files, etc.
Too prone to breaking things, right?
After: You just tick a checkbox in a Swiss Army-like plugin, (packed with many other things), and it’s done. This checkbox hooks a WordPress function to one of the plugin actions, super clean…
You now get the log, the log will be found at the same place everytime, with a standard structure, and after you uninstall the plugin everything returns to clean state.
The result? the test now becomes easy, predictable, the teammates are not affraid of breaking stuff while doing it, becomes democratic.
Bottom Line
Tooling isn’t about pumping out new tools for the sake of it. It’s about detecting complex processes, automating and simplifying them, and improving how we work, making things smoother for the team, and saving time where it matters.
Let’s focus on finding those processes, the rest follows.
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