Automation Made Me a Better Leader: A Developer Relations Take

Ashley Willis, Senior Director of Developer Relations at GitHub, makes a provocative claim: automating parts of her job didn't just save time—it made her a better leader. In a personal essay, she describes how she used automation to handle routine tasks like scheduling, triaging issues, and generating reports, which allowed her to shift her energy toward mentoring, community building, and long-term strategy.

Willis argues that many leaders fall into the trap of busywork masquerading as productivity. By scripting away the repetitive, low-judgment tasks, she created space for the high-touch, human parts of leadership that actually move the needle. She emphasizes that automation isn't about replacing people—it's about replacing the drudgery that keeps leaders from doing their real job.

Key Automation Wins

• Automated meeting scheduling and follow-ups using calendar APIs and simple bots
• Scripted issue triage in open source repos to route bugs and feature requests without manual sorting
• Set up dashboards and automated reporting for team metrics, cutting hours of manual data gathering

Why It Works for Leadership

Willis points out that the biggest bottleneck in leadership is cognitive load, not time. Automation reduces decision fatigue by handling the predictable, leaving leaders with more mental bandwidth for complex problems. She also notes that modeling automation use sets a cultural example—teams see that efficiency is valued, and they're more likely to adopt similar practices.

She doesn't shy away from the risks: poorly designed automation can create more noise than it removes. Her advice is to start small, measure impact, and always keep a human in the loop for decisions that require context or empathy.

“Automation gave me back my calendar, but more importantly, it gave me back my attention.”

While the essay is light on specific tooling or code examples, the core insight is solid: for engineering leaders buried in operational overhead, automation is a force multiplier for leadership, not just productivity.