If a person steps in when your system gets stuck, put them in the diagram.
Tell the customer what they do. Explain when they get called. Account for their time in the price.
This should be a perfectly normal product conversation.
Early systems often need help. Sometimes the useful version of a product will continue to need help, because the job includes exceptions that are expensive or pointless to automate completely.
The founder’s job is to understand that boundary.
How often does an exception happen? Can the person see enough context to handle it? Does their intervention let the system continue, or do they end up doing the entire task themselves?
Those details determine what the customer is buying.
They also determine whether the business can grow. An operation that requires more human attention with every deployment has a different cost structure from one where the same support team can handle more work over time.
Both deserve to be measured properly.
We get suspicious when the human help disappears from the pitch but remains essential to the result. That makes it harder to understand the product, the economics and what progress actually means.
Show the handoff. Improve it. Give the operator a decent interface. Make recovery faster. Learn which situations keep causing problems.
There is serious engineering in that work.
A customer can make an informed decision about a system that needs occasional assistance.
They’ll have a much harder time trusting one that made the assistance a surprise.
Budera Hot Takes. Strong opinions from people actually paying attention.
