Rethink your approach to daily operations and experiments: Part I - Designing an operating management system
You’re running experiments alongside the core operations of your startup. How do you learn and execute simultaneously?
As a startup, your team is operating in a constant state of change and exploration. While you may have found product market fit with a specific customer acquisition channel, growth in that channel will likely plateau over time, making it unlikely for you to keep up with your goals.
There’s an inevitable balance you’ll have to strike between operating a functional business that works while also pursuing all of the potential growth opportunities stemming from both your leadership intuition and hard-earned and learned hypotheses.
Relying on gut instincts or habits may work for a solo founder or small team in the beginning, but as your company grows and evolves, it becomes increasingly important to adopt a methodical approach to experimentation, while designing an ideal operating system to manage what works now. Combining these practices effectively are vital to unlocking the next growth channel and sustaining long-term expansion.
How DO you co-manage both your ongoing operations and growth experiments to get your team to that crucial next stage?
Design your process management to compliment your experiment operations.
Why this works
Managing the operations of your organization requires structure, consistency, and methodical iteration. Once you get it working, this is an area of management that you likely won’t want to spend time on. Sales are happening, customers are using your product, there’s more coming in than going out. Great! Now what? As you shift your efforts to experimentation, you’ll intentionally bifurcate your time to compensate for focusing on these opportunities. However, if you don’t have an operating management system in place, you’ll suddenly feel like you’re swimming in customer complaints and half-finished projects with no oversight into how your “head of” operators are keeping up with the day to day.
Inspiration to keep top of mind: “(Ventures that succeed) are ambidextrous organizations that can manage strategic experimentation and disciplined execution simultaneously.” - The Overlooked Key to a Successful Scale-Up
Why Do This Now
Even as you transition from startup to scaleup, it’s crucial to maintain the elements of your business that are working well while also experimenting with new approaches. Resources are limited and every learning counts. Most things won’t work, so now is the time to ensure you have great systems to help you learn what will. That way, you can focus on opportunities, not problems.
For Part I, we’ll start by thinking about how to design your ongoing operations management. Next week, we’ll follow with structuring great experiments, and close with how to design the two systems to not only coexist, but strengthen each other.
Let’s break this down like an expert generalist. We’ll outline the tools you can use to get this work done, the rules or processes you can implement to move from idea to action, and reflect on how different people on your team can effectively do this work.
Remember: there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Modern operations are the art and science of considering your tools, processes, and people that make up a system for how things get done. That way, the outputs will be as unique as the inputs.
how We Do: how to effectively manage existing operations.
The key to operating effectively in the early days is to transition your state of work from project management to process management. The difference is that while a project has a clear beginning and end, a process is continuous, designed to be repeated, and codified to reduce variability at scale. Once an action is completed more than once at a predictable cadence, it’s time to manage it as a core operating process. When you’re low on resources but want to maximize efficiency, you’ll want to:
1️⃣ Structure communications between key process activities.
2️⃣ Create oversight into the progress between said activities.
3️⃣ Address opportunities for automation and improvement.
Tools 🛠️
Choose the tool that requires the least amount of friction to maintain. This is crucial. You want to get in and get out when you’re managing ongoing ops, so choose wisely.
Monday.com and Asana will allow you to create recurring tasks at preferred cadences to ensure nothing ongoing falls through the cracks.
Notion will give you the option to templatize text and database fields to manage continuous cycles with ease.
Google Sheets built out Gantt-chart style will help you manage ongoing projects and operations, though this takes consistent grooming to get right.
To-Do Lists and Google Calendar reminders are great ways to add accountability and agency to ongoing operations, but these methods are challenging at scale. If you’re starting here, consider automating with the tools above to maximize your time.
Rules (Process): 📝
1️⃣ Structure the communications between key process activities.
Identify and document with your team:
key handoffs between activities. How are we communicating transitions? Slack? Email? Direct mentions within an operations management tool?
how to communicate when things aren’t going as planned. How do we bring up edge cases? Who makes the ultimate decision on what to do at each stage of the process if something goes wrong and needs to be rectified?
2️⃣ Understand the progress between process points.
Document with your team:
milestones within the process that require a stakeholder’s update. Do you as the founder want to know from your head of marketing each step in the creation of the content process, or just when it's posted? In what format is it easiest for your workflow to see these updates?
ideal cadence of updates. Should these happen with regular frequency or is an asynchronous check-in adequate?
a preferred format for updates. Is it a bulleted overview in a communications channel from the process owner? A dashboard with key metrics? Notes and mentions within a document? Where possible, keep it consistent from the start.
People: 🫶
Start by making the implicit explicit if you’ve yet to document those key birthday party invite requirements (who is doing what and when).
Consider the operating habits of the team managing the work. Are they diligent and organized? Will they be actively managing the tracking tools to provide status updates on the process? If tracking is being missed consistently, can you create co-accountability milestones like regular stand-ups or asynchronous updates that help to get everyone on the same page?
Identify the stakeholders as the process progresses. Someone may be a stakeholder throughout the process, but others may be integral in the early stages or the final execution. Consider not only stakeholders, but also identifying contributors.
Identify who is responsible for pushing the actual work forward. Stakeholder updates are important, but it often still leaves the question of who is doing the work to get the stakeholder an update.
Take It Up A Level
3️⃣ Address opportunities for automation and improvement.
Using AI to Improve how You Do:
Leverage AI and bots for reminders and recurring process-oriented work.
Expand brainstorming capabilities of ways to improve your processes by using AI to help generate ideas – then let the humans who are doing the work do what they do best, and make effective decisions for the team.
Begin A Regular Process Improvement Plan: There are endless process improvement methodologies, mostly developed for large and complex projects and institutions. When you’re starting or in the early months / years of operating, spending too much time on both maintaining existing processes at 100% consistency and improving processes daily can produce low ROI. In 0 - 1 operations –
create a communication channel that houses all ideas and potential process optimizations. Ensure these ideas stay out of DMs, 1:1s, and individual emails where possible to co-create a central repository of all points of process friction across owners. Encourage team members to identify tension points as they’re moving through weekly activities while the experiences are fresh.
schedule a dedicated meeting at a regular cadence with all process stakeholders and contributors to discuss new ideas and their implementation. Core internal processes are affected by team members’ attitudes, habits, and beliefs. Align with what best fits the mold of your organization.
Actually Actionable
Nice article. Now what?
We’ve taken the ideas above and put them into an action plan for you and your team.
🗒️ Meeting 1 - 60 minutes - how We Do | Improving Our Operations
Agenda:
Overview from this edition of how We Do. You’re spending time with your team to structure the unstructured to reduce operational variability and give your team their time back. Slow down to speed up! (5 minutes)
Review outstanding elements of the process not yet documented. What do we still need to write down that isn’t currently documented yet repeated with consistency? (20 minutes)
Review the process improvement list. Discuss each item, prioritizing the levers with the largest potential impact on operations for both the customer and internal team. (30 minutes)
Actioning: (5 minutes)
Who is doing what to get this done?
When will these items be completed?
How will we make sure they’ve been completed?
🗒️ Meeting 2 - 45 minutes - how We Do | Improving How We Run Experiments (Outline shared next week!)
When you intentionally design a lightweight yet effective way for your team to manage and improve daily and ongoing operations for your startup, you’ll see a difference in the output of everyone’s work. It will allow your team to put on autopilot what's working well, and make space for new opportunities to explore. That way, when you start experimenting, you’ll be prepared for the next stage of growth.
More on that in the week to come. We’ll see you there!
Writer: Britt
Collaborators: Caleigh, Emily, Scott
🤓 Like what you see? Subscribe! Every Thursday night, you’ll find us in your inbox to provide energy and clarity as you plan your tasks for the upcoming Monday. We’ve timed this strategically so you can end the week on a strong note and, with some external ideas from a generalist team doing this work daily, build operations that scale.