I automated my job (and it made me a better leader)

There’s a persistent myth in tech leadership that automation is something you delegate to junior engineers. But what if the best person to automate your own workflow is you? A senior leader at GitHub recently shared how they implemented 40 automations across their daily tasks—and the outcome wasn’t burnout prevention, though that was a nice side effect. Instead, it fundamentally changed how they lead their team.

The technical foundation here is straightforward but powerful. These automations likely combine GitHub Actions workflows, API integrations, and cloud-based task runners to eliminate repetitive manual work: automatically summarizing pull requests, routing code reviews to the right people, aggregating metrics from multiple dashboards, and flagging blockers before they become problems. The magic isn’t in any single tool—it’s in the workflow orchestration. When a pull request lands, a workflow can trigger status checks, post summaries to Slack, update tracking systems, and notify stakeholders without human intervention. For Python-savvy engineers, this might mean writing Lambda functions on AWS that trigger on CloudWatch events, or using boto3 to manage resources at scale. The infrastructure is already there; the missing piece is usually just connecting the dots.

But here’s where this becomes genuinely interesting: automation forced this leader to think differently about their role. Rather than spending four hours a day in meetings and Slack, they could focus on mentoring, strategy, and solving hard problems. More importantly, building these automations required them to deeply understand their team’s bottlenecks and pain points. You can’t automate what you don’t measure. This self-directed automation effort became an exercise in process visibility—something that immediately translates to better decisions about hiring, tooling, and team structure. It’s the kind of leverage that compounds.

For your own context, this matters practically in two ways. First, if you’re managing systems or teams, start documenting what actually eats your time. Then ask: which of these tasks are rule-based? Approval workflows, status aggregations, routine reports, and escalation logic are all automation candidates. You don’t need a fancy platform—AWS Lambda + EventBridge, GitHub Actions, or even cron jobs with Python scripts are entirely sufficient. Second, understand that automating your own work isn’t laziness or checking out; it’s sharpening your technical edge while scaling your impact as a leader. The best technical leaders aren’t the ones who write the most code—they’re the ones who architect systems that let their team focus on what matters.