The long-term overhead of not automating your operational problems will choke the growth of your product features. Technical debt is well understood to slow down software product development, but I hardly hear anyone discussing operational debt.

Operational debt, or support engineering can kill your product development velocity. Every time someone says “we can do it manually for now” is adding operational debt. Overtime it becomes normal to do everything

People, process, then technology is something that is chirped by founders, and investors alike. The time gap between building process and building technology should be small. Process isn’t a long-term solution, it is a stop-gap while your software team catches up to your process innovations.