Digital product development is becoming faster and more collaborative, but it is also significantly more complex. As teams adopt more tools for ideation, planning, coding, testing, and deployment, the number of handoffs and manual touchpoints increases, leading to slower progress, higher risk, and fragmented workflows. What was once a streamlined pipeline has become a tangled process that drains time and focus. Today’s technology leaders must go beyond managing tools and teams to eliminate inefficiencies and gain timely, accurate insight into progress.
The Hidden Costs of Manual Processes
Consider a consumer electronics company preparing a firmware update for a connected home device. The development team works in GitHub, QA tracks bugs in Jira, and release management coordinates timelines using spreadsheets and weekly calls. Without automation, progress updates are compiled manually and out of date by the time they’re shared, resulting in a last-minute bug slipping through and delaying the product launch by two weeks.
Scenarios like this aren’t outliers. They’re symptoms of a broader challenge facing digital product organizations everywhere. As toolchains grow and workloads increase, manual processes become a major liability, slowing teams down, increasing risk, and making it harder to deliver at the speed the market demands.
That’s why we created this blog series: to break down the biggest barriers to fast, efficient digital product delivery. From aligning strategy with execution to modernizing legacy platforms, each post dives into a key challenge, examines its impact, and shares proven strategies that leading CTOs, engineering leaders, and product teams use to deliver smarter and faster.
In our first post, we tackled the challenge of limited visibility and misalignment. The second post explored how disconnected toolchains contribute to delivery delays. In this post, we turn our attention to the cost of manual processes in high-velocity environments—and how automation can unlock speed, clarity, and efficiency across the entire product development lifecycle.
Understanding the Problem
Manual processes are quietly dragging down productivity across product and engineering teams. Because they’re embedded in daily routines, their impact often goes unnoticed, but it adds up fast. Teams spend countless hours each week on repetitive tasks like tracking updates, formatting reports, and sending status emails. These inefficiencies drain momentum, delay delivery, and distract focus from the work that truly drives value.
What makes this even more concerning is how easily these inefficiencies are normalized, viewed over time as “just the way things are.” But the longer teams stick with manual methods, the greater the cost. Mistakes slip through. Visibility fades. Collaboration suffers. In fast-moving environments where speed and precision matter, small cracks quickly become serious gaps. Teams fall behind, and leaders are left without the insights they need to steer effectively. The true cost isn’t just lost hours. It’s missed opportunities, slower innovation, and declining team morale.
The Negative Impact of Manual Processes
Manual processes may seem harmless initially, but they quickly add up and become major bottlenecks that reduce productivity, increase risk, and slow innovation. As teams grow, these inefficiencies drag down decision-making and delay delivery, turning manual work into a hidden tax on progress. In the sections below, we’ll explore the most common impacts and share real-world examples of how automation helps teams move faster and stay focused on high-value work.
1) Loss of Engineering Productivity
Developers do their best work solving problems and building high-quality software when they can stay in flow. But manual tasks constantly interrupt that focus. Instead of coding, they’re stuck updating spreadsheets, moving tickets between systems, and preparing reports for meetings. Even seemingly minor tasks, like copying notes between tools or sending out status emails, quickly add up and chip away at valuable development time.
Example:
An engineering team manages work in multiple tools and spends hours each week manually updating systems and creating status reports for leadership. This cuts into coding time and slows delivery.
Result:
With automation and integration, updates sync in real-time, and reports generate automatically. Developers regain hours each week, accelerating delivery and improving team morale.
2) Delayed Responsiveness
When processes depend on manual inputs and constant back-and-forth communication, decision-making becomes slower. Time-sensitive issues such as approving a release, triaging a customer-reported bug, or escalating a blocker can stall if someone misses an email or overlooks a shared file. These delays increase risk, reduce agility, and frustrate stakeholders.
Example:
A product team emails a stakeholder for feature approval, but the message is missed. The release is delayed, and momentum stalls while waiting for a response.
Result:
Automated workflows route approvals through the right channels with instant notifications. Stakeholders respond faster, and teams keep work moving without manual follow-ups.
3) Inconsistent and Unreliable Data
When teams manually enter information into different tools, it’s almost impossible to keep everything aligned. Data ends up duplicated, out of sync, or formatted inconsistently. That leads to conflicting reports, mistrust between teams, and bad decisions based on incomplete information.
Example:
A cross-functional team uses separate tools, and manual updates cause conflicting status reports. Leadership can’t tell which version is accurate.
Result:
With connected tools and real-time data sync, all teams see the same status instantly. This alignment removes confusion and supports faster, clearer decisions.
4) Frustrated and Disengaged Teams
People are most engaged when they can focus on meaningful, creative work like solving problems, and delivering value. But when they have to constantly spend time chasing for updates or managing status reports, motivation fades. Teams start to feel like they’re stuck doing work that doesn’t make a difference. Over time, this wears down morale, reduces job satisfaction, and increases turnover.
Example:
A product manager spends most of their time chasing updates and building reports for leadership, leaving little room for strategy, user research, or planning.
Result:
With centralized data and automated reporting, updates are instantly accessible. Product managers can refocus on strategic work, boosting impact, morale, and retention.
How Planview Helps Automate Manual Processes
Manual work and disconnected systems create friction across the software delivery lifecycle. Planview removes these barriers by delivering intelligent automation, seamless collaboration, and real-time visibility, so teams can move faster, reduce risk, and focus on high-impact work.
Streamlines Team Workflows
With Planview AgilePlace, teams eliminate repetitive, manual tasks by automating the flow of work through customizable rules and intelligent triggers. Instead of manually updating cards, assigning tasks, or chasing down status updates, teams stay focused on delivering value.
Key Capabilities:
- Custom card automation to update status, assign owners, and trigger downstream tasks
- AI-powered recommendations to identify bottlenecks and optimize flow
- Real-time progress tracking and visual boards for full team visibility
- Notifications and alerts based on work changes, delays, or risks
Automates Releases and Testing
Releases and testing cycles are often delayed by manual coordination, last-minute surprises, or unclear ownership. Planview’s Release Management and Test Environment Management capabilities bring structure and automation to these critical phases of delivery.
Key Capabilities:
- Automated orchestration of release tasks, environments, and dependencies
- Centralized dashboards to track status across release pipelines
- Integrated approval workflows to streamline governance and compliance
- Environment conflict resolution and scheduling tools to avoid delays
Breaks Down Data Siloes
Disconnected tools slow down collaboration, create duplicated work, and result in unreliable data. Planview Hub solves this by integrating the tools used across development, QA, product, and operations, keeping data consistent, synchronized, and accessible in real time.
Key Capabilities:
- Bi-directional data sync across leading ALM, DevOps, and project management tools
- Field-level mapping and filtering to control what data is shared and when
- Fine-grained access controls to protect IP and sensitive information
- Automated conflict resolution to maintain data integrity across systems
Reclaim Time, Focus, and Speed with Automation
Manual work may seem minor in the moment, but over time it drains productivity, delays delivery, and slows innovation. As toolchains expand and timelines tighten, these small tasks become major risks—pulling focus away from high-value work. Forward-thinking organizations are addressing this by automating repetitive tasks, integrating systems, and enabling real-time visibility to keep teams aligned and moving faster.
Planview helps technology leaders eliminate manual work, unify disconnected tools, and create a clear, connected flow from idea to delivery. The sooner you make the shift, the more time your teams gain to focus, innovate, and stay ahead in a fast-moving market.
If you’re ready to eliminate manual updates, reduce status meetings, and automate the flow of work, watch a demo of Planview’s digital product development solution. See how leading organizations are replacing repetitive tasks with intelligent automation to accelerate delivery and free up teams to focus on what matters most.
Next in this series, we’ll explore the fourth major challenge for digital product leaders: prioritizing high-value work. Learn how leading teams are overcoming the noise to stay focused on meaningful initiatives that drive impact, enhance the customer experience, and advance business goals.
