Seeing Your Work as a System

Key Concepts

• Lights-on work: Steps that are important but require no expertise to execute. Given written instructions, anyone (or any agent) could complete them reliably. Examples: exporting data, comparing columns, formatting output, posting to Slack.
• Judgment work: Steps where reasonable people could disagree on the right call. These require pattern recognition, business context, or taste built from experience. Examples: assessing whether a ranking drop is a real threat, deciding if a content brief is good enough to send.

Quick Reference

The decomposition rule of thumb: The actual number of steps in a workflow is 3-4x higher than what someone will describe from memory. If a teammate says their process has 3 steps, expect 10-12.

How to decompose a recurring task:

1. Pick a real, recurring task that takes at least an hour
2. Write out every individual step (not just the big ones)
3. For each step, identify:
   • What comes in (the input)
   • What comes out (the output)
   • Whether it's lights-on or judgment
   • Any decision points
4. Aim for 10-15 steps. Fewer than 5 means you're still describing the "brochure version" and need to break it down further. More than 15 means some micro-steps can likely be grouped.
5. Count your ratio of lights-on steps to judgment steps

Why the ratio matters: In most marketing workflows, roughly 80% of time goes to lights-on work and 20% to judgment work. The goal of a marketing engineer is to make the lights-on steps invisible so the team's energy goes to judgment work first, not last.

Designing for human-in-the-loop: Not every step should be automated. When you map your system, flag the judgment steps explicitly. These become the points where a human reviews, decides, or edits before the system continues.

If you have fewer than five steps, you're in the brochure version. Break it down further.