Stop chaining brittle Zaps together
Chaining dozens of low-level automations creates silent failures. Consolidate them into governed services with monitoring and clear ownership.
The Brittle Automation Death Spiral
It starts innocently: "Let's automate lead routing with Zapier." Then someone adds another Zap to update Slack. Then another to sync to your CRM. Before you know it, you have 47 interconnected Zaps, each one a single point of failure, and nobody knows which one broke when leads stop flowing.
Warning signs you're in the spiral:
- 😰 No one owns the full workflow
Marketing built Zap 1-5, Sales built 6-10, and IT has no idea what 11-47 do
- 💀 Silent failures are common
Leads vanish and you only notice when revenue drops 3 weeks later
- 🔥 Everything is coupled to everything
Changing one Zap breaks three others you didn't know existed
- 🐌 Delays compound
A process that should take 30 seconds now takes 4 minutes because of sequential polling
Why teams fall into this trap
Speed over structure
No-code tools make it easy to ship fast, but without governance, every quick fix becomes permanent infrastructure.
No single owner
Different teams build different pieces. Nobody has the full picture or accountability for the end-to-end workflow.
No observability
You don't know it failed until someone manually checks. No alerts, no dashboards, no error budgets.
Sunk cost fallacy
"We've already built 40 Zaps, we can't rebuild now." So you add Zap #41 instead of fixing the root problem.
The Better Approach: Orchestrated Services
Instead of chaining individual automations, group them by business outcome and build them as governed, monitored services.
Group by outcome, not tool
Instead of "Zap that updates Slack" and "Zap that updates CRM," build "Lead Routing Service" that handles the entire outcome.
❌ BAD: Tool-based
- • Zap 1: Form → Webhook
- • Zap 2: Webhook → CRM
- • Zap 3: CRM → Slack
- • Zap 4: Slack → Email
✅ GOOD: Outcome-based
- Lead Routing Service:
- • Receives form submission
- • Creates CRM record
- • Notifies assigned rep
- • Sends confirmation email
Add retries and queues
When you call third-party APIs (Slack, CRM, email), don't fail immediately. Queue the work and retry with exponential backoff.
// Resilient API call pattern
async function sendToSlack(message) {
const maxRetries = 3;
for (let i = 0; i < maxRetries; i++) {
try {
await slack.post(message);
return { success: true };
} catch (error) {
if (i === maxRetries - 1) throw error;
await sleep(1000 * Math.pow(2, i));
}
}
}
This simple pattern prevents 90% of transient failures from becoming permanent data loss.
Build in observability from day one
Every service should emit logs, metrics, and alerts. Know when it's failing before your customers do.
Essential monitoring:
Design for rollback
Before you push changes to production, have a plan to roll them back. Feature flags, blue-green deploys, or simple version pinning.
Rollback checklist:
- ✓ Can I toggle the new behavior off without redeploying?
- ✓ Do I have the previous version tagged in source control?
- ✓ Can I revert database migrations if needed?
- ✓ Have I tested the rollback procedure in staging?
Migration Strategy: From Zap chaos to governed services
Phase 1: Audit (Week 1)
- • Map every automation and what it does
- • Identify the business outcomes they support
- • Find the most critical path (usually lead → revenue)
Phase 2: Consolidate critical path (Week 2-3)
- • Rebuild the most important workflow as a single service
- • Add retries, logging, and alerts
- • Run in parallel with old Zaps for validation
Phase 3: Cut over (Week 4)
- • Route 10% of traffic to new service
- • Monitor for 48 hours, fix any issues
- • Gradually increase to 100%
- • Turn off old Zaps only after 2 weeks of stable operation
Phase 4: Repeat for other workflows (Ongoing)
- • Prioritize by business impact and failure frequency
- • Rebuild one workflow per sprint
- • Build internal documentation as you go
The Bottom Line
Zapier, Make, and other no-code tools are fantastic for prototyping. But when your business depends on it, you need architecture, not duct tape. Consolidate by outcome, add resilience, monitor ruthlessly, and sleep better at night.