Any advice for someone just starting with automation?

I would offer up this advice: think small. Your program may have a grand vision and a lot of objectives, but work in manageable chunks, and launch each new piece as you can. This allows you to more quickly see what's working and what needs to be tweaked. And in the building itself, make small self-contained pieces (often collect data -> build audience -> send message -> update subscriber record). Instead one automation that does each of those steps 5 times to generate five different emails, make 5 separate automations and have the first automation call the second and the second call the third.

Then if you do need to tweak or add a test or pause a particular message (or heaven-forbid - something breaks), you can make sure the rest of your automations are't impacted.