Ask what happens if a step fails halfway through

Before trusting a multi-step automation, ask yourself what happens if it fails exactly in the middle. Does it leave things in a half-finished state, or does it clean up after itself and leave the record untouched?

This matters because a lot of automation trouble comes not from the failure itself but from the mess a failure leaves behind — a payment recorded without the matching confirmation sent, a customer added to a list without the welcome message that was supposed to follow. Thinking through the halfway failure case before it happens means you can design the process to fail safely, instead of discovering the mess only after a real customer got caught in it. I walk through this question for every multi-step automation I build now, since a partial failure always leaves more of a mess than the original problem would have.

Walk through each step and ask what a partial failure at that exact point would leave behind.

Try this today: pick your automation with the most steps and walk through what a failure at the middle step would actually leave behind.