[josephg]

This sounds terrifying in its own way, but one of the best decisions I made at a tiny (5 person) startup a few years ago was sitting the smart, non-technical CEO down and teaching him SQL. All our data lived in a Postgres database, and he was amazed by the sort of questions he could ask the database. I showed him some SQL desktop tool (and helped him set it up). And showed him some different sql queries he could run and how to export data into CSV for excel. He instantly understood the “single source of truth” idea and why data modelling was important. He was gleeful about being able to change content on the website without asking someone else to do it for him.

I’m sure he’ll make a mess of something down the line, and I hope someone after my time added audit logs (to track what he inevitably changes and breaks). But there’s something deep and important in empowering other aspects of the business to interact with the computing silo. There’s a time for automation. And there’s a time before that where custom tooling isn’t worth building yet. And just changing records manually is the right approach.