Here's why most agent projects crater: nobody mapped the real workflow first. A team decides to automate customer onboarding. They brief a developer, buy a platform, spend three months building. The agent handles maybe 30% of cases, breaks constantly, creates more cleanup work than it saves. Everyone blames the technology.

Wrong diagnosis. The problem was simpler, nobody actually documented what happens during onboarding before trying to automate it.

The Two-Hour Map

Successful implementations start with a room and the people who do the actual work. Not their managers. The folks in the trenches.

Ask them to walk through one real example from last week. Not the textbook case, a messy Tuesday example with all the annoying bits included.

Write every step. "Customer emails request" isn't a step. The real steps: Email hits shared inbox. Sarah checks if they're existing or new. Existing? She pulls their file from the shared drive, reviews history. New? Welcome template gets sent, folder gets created.

Capture the decisions: Why does Sarah route this one to John? What information does she need that's not in the email? When does she escalate?

Get the exceptions: Incomplete customer file? Urgent request? Email arrives Friday at 4:58 PM?

This is where the magic happens. "Customer onboarding" isn't one thing—it's 47 micro-decisions, information scattered across five systems, and judgment calls Sarah makes from experience nobody's written down.

Why This Changes Everything

Now you can actually design something that works. You know which steps are rule-based (agent territory) versus judgment calls (human territory). You know which systems need connecting. You see the edge cases before they break production.

Better: you can scope intelligently. Maybe the agent handles steps 1-4, Sarah makes the judgment call at step 5, agent finishes steps 6-10. That's still massive value—and it's something you can actually ship.

The Real Discovery

Sometimes the mapping session reveals the process itself is broken. No agent will fix a fundamentally flawed workflow.

I've seen this pattern repeatedly: teams start mapping their process for an agent, realize halfway through that their current workflow makes no sense, and end up redesigning the process before building anything. The agent project becomes a forcing function for fixing broken operations.

That's the actual value. The best agent implementations don't automate your current process—they automate the process you discover you should have been running all along.

The two-hour mapping session isn't prep work. It's the work. Everything else is just execution.

The Action Item

Pick one workflow causing pain right now. Get the people who actually run it in a room for two hours this week. Map what really happens, not what the procedure manual says. You'll either find your agent blueprint or discover you need to fix the process first.

Either way, you're further ahead than the teams building agents blind.