Contact me

You're Automation Isn't Broken

It’s just faster than everything else in your tech stack

Automation system interface showing error messages and status updates.

Here’s a sentence that sounds made up but isn’t:

your automation can fail because it’s too fast.

Not buggy. Not badly built. Just quicker off the mark than the platform it’s relying on can actually keep up with.

The Scenario

You add someone to a segment. A second later, an automation checks whether they’re in it yet. The answer comes back no. Not because it’s wrong, but because the platform hasn’t finished updating itself. Segments take a moment to refresh behind the scenes, and nobody told your automation to wait for that. It just asked the question a beat too early and took the answer at face value.

So it does the sensible thing with the information it’s got. It skips the step, or fires the wrong branch, or does nothing at all. From the outside, this looks exactly like a broken automation. From the inside, it’s a perfectly well built one asking a completely reasonable question at a slightly unreasonable moment.

Example one: the tag that's technically there, eventually

Someone buys your course. Your checkout cart applies a purchase tag and hands off to your email platform. Your automation checks straight away whether that tag has landed. A fraction of a second too soon, and the answer is no, because the handoff is still processing.

So your brand new customer doesn’t get their welcome sequence. Not because there’s anything wrong with the welcome sequence. Because the automation asked before the system had finished answering.

Example two: the segment that isn't ready yet

You move someone into a “recently purchased” segment so they’ll get a specific follow-up. The automation checks that segment almost instantly, the way it’s built to. The platform is still quietly refreshing it in the background. As far as the automation’s concerned, there’s nothing there, so it skips the step and moves on.

Why this drives people quietly mad

It’s intermittent. It works fine most of the time, then randomly doesn’t, with no pattern anyone can immediately spot. Nine successful runs and one mysterious skip doesn’t look like a timing issue. It looks like the automation’s decided to have an off day for no reason.

That’s the worst kind of bug to have. “Sometimes it just doesn’t work” isn’t a symptom, it’s a mystery, and mysteries eat hours.

The fix, which is almost insultingly simple

You build in a pause. A short wait between the trigger and the moment the automation goes and checks anything, just long enough for the platform to catch up with what it was told to do. It’s not clever. Nobody’s putting this on a certificate. It’s just giving the system a moment to finish its sentence before you ask it what it just said.

The bit worth remembering

Not everything that looks broken is broken. Some things are just running at a different speed to the system standing next to them, and the fix isn’t more logic or a longer troubleshooting session, this is especially true for third party connectors like Zapier, Make.com and N8n. It’s timing. Sometimes the most technical-sounding problem in your entire funnel gets solved by making the automation count to three before it opens its mouth.

Related Posts