Rethink your approach to daily operations and experiments: Part III - Designing a system that strengthens the whole
You’re running experiments alongside the core operations of your startup. How do you learn and execute simultaneously?
Now that you’ve mastered designing a system to run your core operations, and implementing a system to experiment effectively, you’ll recognize that these are two operational streams that not only need to run alongside each other but work together in a complementary way. They should weave together like a braid where it’s hard to tell one strand from the other.
What does that mean? Simply put, if you don’t consider how the two systems will work together, they’ll become two separate entities that have to be managed, instead of functioning as self-organizing structures. Work will feel siloed and ultimately they’ll stymy each other.
How DO you comanage your ongoing company work and experiments that help you grow to that crucial next stage?
Design your process management to complement your experiments.
Why This Works
In short, your core operations represent your processes, and your experiments represent your projects. You need both project and process management in any startup or well-functioning organization.
All too often, startup teams just let these develop on their own without designing these systems to work together. If you bring this work into the forefront of importance, rather than subconsciously letting the systems be formed by individual or founder working habits, you’ll find that this works because of the intentionality.
In this way, you’re intentionally thinking like an internal product manager, you’re thinking about your business like a product, and this intentionality prevents these two systems from being siloed, bringing clarity and structure to both, while allowing you to set it up well, thereby integrating the two to function co-dependently.
Why Do This Now
The ratio of processes to projects should increase over time as a function of an organization’s maturity (Per the CEO of Process.st in Come Up For Air). In the early stages, you’ll likely be operating with the large majority of your work as projects, and a much smaller subset as processes. But if you treat everything like a project, especially if you design a lean system for managing projects that work well for your cross-functional team, you’ll spend more time on work that matters. This also provides the space to focus on codifying processes by developing SOPs, thereby turning your successful experiments into formalized operational processes.
But there’s more here that affects implementation. Startup growing pains often mean founders confronting fears of losing control, which means that if you build these systems well now, founders feel connected to the work being done, and teams feel that have the fluidity to work in the best way for them, making effective decisions on the fly, and attribute all types of work being done towards key progress.
Let’s break this down like an expert generalist. As not only doers, but builders, generalists leverage the tools, rules, and people needed to create effective systems.
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 and the outputs will be as unique as the inputs.
how We Do: how to effectively integrate your project (experiments) and process (ongoing operations) management systems
We can start by looking at the systems side-by-side to see how they might intersect.
Outside of clear overlaps of structure, you can see that both systems are designed for three crucial components — accountability, transparency, and progress. Because at the end of the day, this is what you want from your teams. This is what you want from your systems. And this final system you’ll design, which integrates these two, well-designed systems in the most functional way, is built in a way that will ensure these three things are experienced in your operations no matter how busy or stressful things get.
Design thinking asks – what is this for and who is this for? We’re designing these systems for the people doing the work that matters (who) to ultimately better solve our customer’s problems in the most efficient and effective manner (what). And the biggest hurdle in designing these systems for people is that people are irrational. They’re going to follow the path of least resistance to move at startup speed and get done all that’s required of them.
Since people act on behaviors if they’re prompted to do so and their motivation is high enough because friction for achievement is low, building these systems now overcomes the struggles of managing individual work habits, and brings the team together into one, high-functioning unit.
To converge your core operations and experiments, create an Operations Realignment System. 🔀
1️⃣ Begin each month with a meeting to readdress capacity for both individuals and the team at large.
2️⃣ Realign your core operating activities with your goals.
3️⃣ Reiterate and establish internal operating structures for communication, accountability, and ownership.
4️⃣ Address opportunities for automation and improvement.
1️⃣ Readdress Capacity
Tools 🛠️
Working time - admin time - meetings = your team’s capacity (Come Up For Air). Without spending too much time getting granular with time tracking, assigning concrete figures to the duration of projects and tasks remains an important aspect to consider. Most teams are surprised once they invest one cycle in this exercise about what they’ve uncovered about team capacity and how they generally operate.
Export your Google or Outlook Calendar to Google Sheets or Excel to quickly see how many hours meetings are taking as part of the work day. Add in tasks for a task management tool (or conversely, add these into your project management tool) to get the full scope of your capacity.
Try Linear, popular with technical and product teams for its popular UX. (The founders even named it Linear to signify progress).
Utilize Asana’s Workload Management tool to assign hours or effort to tasks to better understand the team’s capabilities.
Rules (Process) 📝
Review team capacity, and clearly articulate how much time is left for experiments, and how much time needs to be allotted to keep the ship running and your core operations functioning. Once you determine team capacity, remind yourself as this cycle progresses where the team is in capacity using the tools outlined before you change things midstream.
Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. Look at team capacity, and identify where you can shave off time on work that’s not progressing the team forward.
Address team meetings for the month ahead. Can you add no-meeting days, or deep work blocks to make sure the team has adequate time to balance both ongoing work and new experiments and aren’t bogged down in status updates?
People 🫶
Surface feedback from 1:1s into your overall analysis. This is an exercise in empathy. Is your team feeling burnt out? Is a particular bottleneck between teams stifling the ability to execute effectively? Factor that into your decisions just as you are quantitatively considering the actual working hours the team has to accomplish both operating streams.
Think through available working days in the month upcoming. Have you considered company-wide or individual team member days off? How will this impact the team’s ability to drive home operational objectives? Is what you’ve proposed realistic based on who you have to manage the work?
2️⃣ Align all activities towards goals
Once you have a clear understanding of the team’s capacity, gut-check that the activities you’re spending time on actually align with your team’s goals. Just because you have the capacity for a new experiment, doesn’t mean the experiment should come to life.
Tools 🛠️
Provide a clear line of sight from where your goals live to where your activities are actively being managed in a project or work management tracker. Wherever possible, keep both in the same tool (i.e. a Notion page with clearly stated Mission, Vision, and Values, and a Notion PM database of tasks and projects). That way, you and your team never lose sight of the reason why you’re doing what you’re doing.
If they live in different tools, say Google Docs and Monday.com, link the two back and forth to each other where possible so you can easily access both (remember: reduce friction in these systems to increase adoption of both!).
Rules (Process) 📝
Alignment requires effective documentation of what is thought, what is said, and what is decided. Your process should align your communications and actions so it’s clear to the team at a glance what is occurring, why, and who is owning what.
Remember your mission, vision, and strategy as it relates to your operational goals. Ensure you’re reviewing these when planning your operations to ensure you’re building a roadmap of experiments and general operations that are working towards your goals.
Consider implementing OKRs as a means of aligning your goals and actions.
People 🫶
When you synchronize daily tasks with your company's long-term objectives and significant milestones, it provides a sense of purpose to your employees' endeavors, highlighting their crucial role in the organization's achievements. On days that work feels hard (because startup work is hard!), this exercise in alignment will go a long way in motivating your team.
3️⃣ Establish (or re-establish) internal operating structures
With a clear understanding of team capacity and company-wide goals, reiterate and establish internal operating structures for communication, accountability, and ownership.
Tools 🛠️
Lean on knowledge management systems to codify structure and approaches. Try –
Communication is key - what’s the best way to communicate progress and milestones with your team? Will this be different for your operations and your experiments?
IRL
Email / Phone / Text
Review how you’re tracking tasks for both core and experiment operations. For both, are each team member’s responsibilities in the outcome clearly outlined? Will this be different for your operations and your experiments? Try –
Rules (Process) 📝
Ensure every task and project has a clear owner, a date for completion, and a way that updates and milestones are communicated.
Honor crucial team-wide meetings. For any key meetings (whether they be operational or opportunities to connect as a team), ensure you’re doing everything you can to stick to the scheduled time. Consistently holding these conversations will signal to your team that the content is truly a priority.
People 🫶
Have you evenly distributed the work of both core and experimental operations across your team, or is there one owner responsible for the majority of these? What happens if this person gets sick, or needs to step away unexpectedly for a day or two? How can you build in contingencies in case owners need to take a step away without the team losing sight of progress or being unsure of the status of where an experiment is?
4️⃣ Address opportunities for automation and improvement
Even a system (or multiple systems) intentionally designed will still not be perfect. Things still will not go according to plan. You will realize this both midstream and as you analyze your work at the end of cycles when you begin reflecting. Expect and welcome these as part of a well-functioning system.
Tools 🛠️
Leverage connector tools like Zapier to reduce tool fatigue. Can you bring your work and communications about said work back and forth easily between systems? You’ll reduce errors and give your team more capacity in the process.
In the age of AI, many of your existing tools are likely integrating AI capabilities into their infrastructures. Give yourself / your team some extra space to explore these capabilities. Go a few steps back and build this into your team’s capacity planning. Slow down to speed up.
Rules (Process) 📝
Are there duplicative tasks or processes in your core and experiment operations? Can any steps be removed? Can you hold one team update meeting instead of having multiple meetings to share updates on core and experiment operations milestones?
Dedicate time to reflecting on how you operate, bringing in perspectives from across your organization. While looking back is a key part of this exercise, looking forward is as well. Ask everyone to come to the table with suggestions.
After deciding which improvements to try first, set a meeting a month or two in the future to check in and see how they’re working for you.
People 🫶
The perspective of the people doing the tasks is incredibly valuable. They likely see things you can’t and have ideas for how to make meaningful improvements.
Set a precedent of team members and founders collectively sharing ideas and perspectives. Sometimes individuals don't always think their ideas matter or that they won't be listened to and when that happens, you lose out on so much great insight for systemic improvements.
Take It Up A Level
Using AI to Improve how You Do:
Build complex schedules using AI. Provide resources, team capacity, and context into ChatGPT and you’ll be delivered a schedule that considers your constraints.
Get a pulse on how it’s going without recency bias. Copy notes from your 1:1s into ChatGPT to get a succinct picture of what’s been happening most often, and what the consistent pain points of your processes are from your team members.
Digging Into More Resources
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
Shared in PT I
🗒️ Meeting 2 - 45 minutes - how We Do | Improving How We Run Experiments
Shared in PT II
🗒️ Meeting 3 - 60 minutes - how We Do | Building Our Operations to Scale
Review this how We Do to solidify team understanding of the next steps at hand (5 min)
Identify what are your core operating processes and what are your experiments/areas for experiments. (While this sounds duplicative, sometimes saying the basics out loud is helpful because team members may have different levels of understanding about what constitutes a process vs a project.) (20 min)
Look at who is responsible for what is on that list. How is the workload distribution? (15 min)
Review the systems in place for communication, project management, and gathering internal feedback. Do you have the support structures in place that you need or do some areas need improvements? (15 min)
Schedule your key meetings (and commit to them. Remember - the system runs itself when you make your rituals work for you). (5 min)
Once you’ve effectively organized and automated your ongoing experiment operations for accountability, transparency, and progress, you’ll have intentionally designed a well-organized operating system for your startup that can lead you to scale. Work becomes less chaotic, and you and your team, no matter the size or makeup of your team, will all be charging forward in the same direction toward something that can truly make a change for the customers you seek to serve, all while feeling easy in the process.
And what this “team” should and could look like? More on that next week.
Writer: Britt