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Flexible logic and scope extensions

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🌱 Emerging logic and scope extensions

It is common that as we build a system to automatically replicate what an intelligent person does, we discover that aspects of your business logic were not disclosed.

But they only become clear as we try and codify (i.e. make explicit) the logic in order to automate it.

Don’t worry – it’s normal to discover things as we go ... we call it emerging logic. It happens and is a natural part of automating a business.

Worked example of emerging logic

You might have told us you needed an if this then that workflow (a TRIGGER then ACTION type of thing). For instance: When a web form is submitted (TRIGGER) create deal in CRM (ACTION), i.e.

if TRIGGER then ACTION

But now you see that automation working, you realise it wasn’t as simple as that: There are actually multiple outcomes you might need depending on some other conditions (VARIABLES). So you actually need something like this:

if TRIGGER (and VARIABLE A) then ACTION A

if TRIGGER (and VARIABLE B) then ACTION B

if TRIGGER (and VARIABLE A & VARIABLE B) then ACTION C

So now you realise that you need it to do something that it’s not currently built to do. OK, let’s see what we can do about that:

1. Hardcode additional ‘branches’

So we could edit your automation to ‘hard code’ in three branches to handle each combination of your variables. In Zapier this will be three ‘paths’ in Make, three ‘branches’ based on router modules.

This works fine for the variable combinations you know about now... but if something changes, you’ll need to edit your hardcoded branches – perhaps needing to call us or another specialist. If nothing is going to change, then go with this option. But if you may need to ‘flex’ read on...

2. Build in flexible logic

But then what if one day you realise that it’s too rigid to only have three branches, and you actually don’t know how many you will need? Maybe you need to temporarily change what happens when VARIABLE A because someone who normally deals with those deals are on holiday?

That’s when you need ‘flexible middle’ logic, commonly it will work exactly like a ‘lookup’ function in an excel spreadsheet. We will provide you with a dedicated space to manage some ‘matching’ logic, and then build your automation to stop by at this dataset to follow your instructions on how to proceed with later stages of the workflow.

🚥 Flexible logic

For example, what if you wanted to be able to dynamically choose a colleague to assign a new CRM deal to, based on a form field such as Country of Residence of the prospect?

People come and go, so you need to make sure you can change this at any point without rug-pulling your tech. The goal is to avoid hardcoding that person’s email anywhere in your automations.

We can handle that matching logic in a tool like Airtable or Coda (this page is a Coda doc)

You have one table called countries and one of sales associates. In the countries table (see below) you have a relationship to the sales associates table, allowing you to pick the right person to handle leads from that country.

In the same way you can select a country below and see the relevant sales associate, so to will your automation if we construct it with flexible logic.

Imagine you are Zapier, try it out

⁠

🇺🇸 United States

⁠

Barbara [ CRM192920 ]

⁠

Sample ‘Flexible Logic’ dataset

countries

countries

Country of Residence

Sales Associate

CRM ID

🇺🇸 United States

Barbara Deal-Chase

CRM192920

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Tom Closer

CRM191929

🇸🇬 Singapore

Bob Seller

CRM187829

🇦🇺 Australia

Barbara Deal-Chase

CRM192920

🇨🇦 Canada

Tom Closer

CRM191929

🇫🇷 France

Bob Seller

CRM187829

There are no rows in this table

⁠

sales associates

sales associates

Sales Associate

First

Last

Phone

CRM ID

Barbara Deal-Chase

Barbara

Deal-Chase

babs@salespro.co

(555) 123-4567

CRM192920

Tom Closer

Tom

Closer

tom@salespro.co

(555) 123-1213

CRM191929

Bob Seller

Bob

Seller

bob@salespro.co

(555) 123-2910

CRM187829

There are no rows in this table

⁠

💵 Benefits of building in flexible logic

There are several benefits of building flexibility into your automations:

You don’t need to pay developers to tweak your automations whenever your logic changes

You can change mappings instantly and easily

You have total visibility of the logic of your automations, nothing is hidden in a blackbox. This is great for business continuity planning, data security and audit purposes.

You increase the longevity of your system and reduce tech sprawl

You maximise the uptime of your system by eliminating breaking changes from upstream or downstream apps in the workflow.

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