The automation design gap
Why do Zaps get rebuilt
three times?
You can wire your first useful Zap in an afternoon. That's what makes Zapier magic — and what makes it dangerous. Six months in, you have forty Zaps, half of them forgotten, most of them silently broken, and when one of them fires at the wrong moment it takes out a customer experience nobody knew depended on it.
The real issue is not node count or plan pricing. It's that each Zap was built as a tactical response, not as part of a designed operation. Nobody asked: which processes should be automated? In what order? With what human checkpoints? Which ones should have stayed manual? Those are design questions, and Zapier doesn't ask them.
Henry is the design layer that asks them. He maps your operation using the AAAERRR methodology from Deliberate Work, specifies each step across three planes, and runs a Fit Assessment that sorts every step into automate / augment / leave-manual. The Zaps you build after that are the ones that should exist — and the ones that shouldn't, don't.
If you're a solo founder or small operator, this is how you stop paying the friction tax of Zaps that run the wrong thing perfectly. If you run a team's operations, it's how you keep your automation layer in sync with how the work should actually flow.
Process selection up front
Henry's Fit Assessment tells you which steps deserve a Zap before you build one. Not every process should be automated.
Human-in-the-loop design
Steps flagged for human judgment become Paths + delay + approval patterns in Zapier, placed intentionally instead of retrofitted after a bad outcome.
Trigger logic from step intent
Work Plane intent and Execution Plane triggers translate into clean Zap trigger + filter logic. Fewer edge-case misfires, fewer guard filters bolted on after the fact.