A former product head explains how running payroll manually first, like a white-glove service, revealed what to automate. By doing the work by hand before building software, the team discovered real pain points instead of guessing.
So what was it like being the head of product for a high growth startup? And this is actually interesting. It's an interesting philosophy on building software in general. And this term was coined. I'm going to butcher it. Maybe it's Amazon if someone was called Mechanical Turk. And the idea being that before you invest a lot of time and money and resources to building a software to automate something, do it manually so you can learn what it's like. And so when we first acquired this payroll system, it basically it barely ran payroll. And so we couldn't really sell it. But what we could do is we could kind of use it on our back end to offer a managed service. And so what we did was we kind of went out to a lot of different companies and said, hey, we've got a payroll system, but it's fully managed. It's white glove service. We do it all for you. And it's run by payroll experts. People who've been, you know, know what they're doing and you know, when a client would agree to it and they'd be like, all right, that sounds like a great, you know, great idea, let's do it. Obviously, you know, they open up the curtain and here I was smiling like, hey, first day on the job type of thing. And it forced me to learn. What's your tech stack? It's just a bunch of guys. It's literally a bunch of, yeah, a bunch of people in the background just working. But that forced me to figure it out, like when I had to report, I had to like copy information off of PDFs and somehow get it into an Excel spreadsheet and, you know, parse information so that it all looked clean and make calculations manually on spreadsheets and stuff. Until I got everything organized and started learning like, wow, people in payroll will waste so much time doing X, Y and Z. Let's automate that. That makes so much sense to automate. And so it just became to a point where I knew what to build because I was building it for me. And that was the best part of the job. That's why I was the right fit for doing that.
