Founding an automation team from zero
Spotted the automation opportunity in tax compliance, built the business case, hired the team, and shipped 20+ self-service applications that analysts could run and build on their own.
Context
Tax compliance ran on manual, repetitive, rule-based work: data entry, spreadsheet manipulation, filing workflows. The department had no engineering support and no budget for custom software.
I started building automations to fix my own workflows, and saw the pattern repeat across the department.
Constraints
- No engineering team and no software budget.
- Users were tax analysts, not technologists.
- A cost center expected to do more with less every year.
Options on the table
Tax workflows would never outrank revenue-facing work in an IT queue.
The work was predictable and rule-based, so it could be automated with analytics tooling rather than custom engineering. Making the tools self-service, and teaching analysts to build their own, multiplied what three people could deliver.
The decision
I built the business case, secured headcount, and founded a team of three with a charter to turn manual workflows into self-service applications on a shared platform with parameterized, unattended workflows.
We paired the tools with training so non-technical analysts could build their own solutions.
My role
Identified the opportunity, wrote the business case, hired and managed the team, and owned the charter and roadmap.
Outcome
The platform grew to 20+ self-service applications covering sales and use tax compliance workflows, and analysts started building their own. I was promoted twice in four years, from Tax Manager to Director.
It was my first 0-to-1 product, before I had the job title for it, and the reason I moved into product management.
What I would change
Measure hours saved per application from the start. The impact was obvious to the team and harder to prove to everyone else.