Tackling common operational tangles
Whether with a team or on your own, anticipating operational challenges like these can help you bring calm to chaos.
Chances are if you’re reading this article, you’re facing some operational problems in your organization or are feeling daunted trying to bring organization to your team. These problems can feel exacerbated in these uncertain times, while many are working from home.
I can assure you: the problems you’re facing are not unique. By sharing the three most common challenges I’ve encountered on teams in my past 10 years of working in creative operations, I hope to help you feel less alone in your experiences and empowered to try new approaches to your own operations work.
Challenge #1: Teams lack empathy for one another.
You might hear: “I have my own things to focus on.”
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. While this may seem fluffy and touchy-feely, empathy is fundamental to building healthy and collaborative teams.
The friction I see between teams or organizations often stems from a lack of empathy. At a previous company, the lack of empathy I witnessed between designers and engineers was unavoidable. Designers made it known they were frustrated because they felt engineers would shut down any new ideas they wanted to try. Equally, engineers were frustrated because they felt that designs would be “thrown over the fence” without any consideration of engineering timelines or constraints. All of this was exacerbated by the fact that the two teams were split between offices that were about a 45-minute drive apart.
I needed to find a way to break down the walls between design and engineering and figure out how to build empathy between the teams so we could all move forward and focus on getting work done. The answer was simple and one of the single most powerful things you can do to build empathy: getting people to talk to each other.
In my case, pre-COVID, this meant that I drove the designers on my team down to our other office twice a week to meet the humans who were building our products. Putting faces to the names was the first step to building empathy between eng and design. Getting the engineers and designers together for a few hours each week allowed them to talk in person about the feasibility of designs and collaborate in real-time.
In my experience, 80% of collaboration happens outside of meetings. Important collaboration moments increase when people are naturally in proximity to each other. “Hey, can you check out this design? What do you think? Could we build this?” These days, finding ways to get on video chat quickly — whether Slack hangouts, or Facetime — can help unblock teams and facilitate faster decision making and productivity. It can be hard to make this leap, especially for introverts, but learning to do it can make all the difference.
Challenge #2: Teams are not aligned in their roles or priorities.
You might hear: “Your priority isn’t my priority.”
One key to alignment is establishing role clarity. This may seem like a no brainer, but how many of you have ever been in a meeting where you’re not entirely sure who’s owning what? It’s happened to me a lot over my years in Design Ops. And since Design Ops is a relatively new field, especially for in-house design teams, that means I have to constantly define my role and scope to my XFN partners. One tool that’s helped me with role clarity is a team charter.
Your team charter is essentially each person’s elevator pitch. It forces every person to answer the following questions:
- What is my purpose?
- What are my responsibilities?
- What does success look like in my role?
The charter aligns the team around the work itself, but it also gives us something to share with XFN teams, creating clarity around scope and expectations.
Another quick and easy way to create role clarity is the round robin. Get your project team together (typically at a project kickoff meeting) and go around the room and have everyone state their role and what they’ll be responsible for on the project. For example,
“I’m Anne, I’m the program manager on this project. I’m responsible for crafting all communications in regards to the project and ensuring that XFN stakeholders have visibility into what we’re doing. I will also be tracking our project status, flagging any misalignments and ensuring that we stay on schedule.”
This is a quick and easy way to get clarity and align on who’s doing what.
Finally, and possibly my favorite, the pre-mortem. You’ve probably heard of a post-mortem after a big project is over. It’s essentially a retrospective to look back on what went well, what could have gone better and what we’ll change moving forward. Well, the pre-mortem is essentially this idea, only you do it before a project has begun.
A pre-mortem typically happens at a project kickoff. It’s a great thing to try after you’ve gone around the room and established role clarity. The exercise is simple and works like this: Simply ask the team two questions:
Framing the questions this way gets the team to think about what to avoid and opens a discussion on how to work as a team to avoid project pitfalls. I’ve found a lot more success with this type of forward-looking question. Instead of asking “How do you want to work together? What should our process be?” The pre-mortem gets the collective group thinking about what they want to avoid and opens a broader discussion focused on how to work together.
Challenge #3: Teams don’t have visibility into the scope of the work, nor how the pieces fit together.
You might hear: “I don’t know what you do and how that impacts me…”
Has an XFN partner ever asked, “Why are you working on that?” Or “What problem are you trying to solve?” Maybe you’ve experienced the dreaded scope creep, or you’ve seen something ship in your product and you have no idea how it got approved. Each of these issues comes down to a lack of visibility. They can be remedied in a simple way with some lightweight documentation.
When I joined Pinterest, documentation was not consistent nor clear. I’ll admit we haven’t hit document nirvana, but we’ve gotten a lot better! After much trial and error, there are three documents that have been key to unlocking our teams…
The brief, also known as the PRD (Product Requirement Document).
A simple brief can change the course of your work. Briefs save time and facilitate alignment and visibility into what the team is doing and why. Briefs weren’t a typical practice when I joined Pinterest. We were scrappy, we moved fast, and it was believed that briefs would only slow us down! Ahh…but once introduced, they became important in helping teams align and move quickly. Since my teams at Pinterest were hesitant to adopt new processes, I needed to ensure that a brief was incredibly lightweight and easy to fill out. After some trial and error, I identified the few key elements that make a brief successful:
- One sentence problem statement
- One sentence goal
- Success metrics or information that let you understand whether you’ve achieved your goal
- A clear timeline with milestones and end date
That’s it! Note that it doesn’t need to be an intensive doc with market research, SWOT analysis, etc.
The project tracker
Project trackers come in all shapes and sizes. Each Program Manager on my team has had to find the right type of tracker that works for them and their team. The goal of the project tracker is simple: capture who’s doing what, when. From Trello to project management software like Basecamp to good old fashioned spreadsheets, there are numerous different tools that can help with project tracking. Whichever method you choose, make sure it’s highlighting the who, what and when for your projects. Always make sure your project tracker is shared broadly with your cross-functional partners.
The experiment tracker
If you ever find yourself in an organization that does A/B testing, having a way to track your progress is critical. How else will you know if you’ve reached your goal? The key elements of a good experiment tracker are:
- Title of experiment with link to testing tool
- Description of what you’re testing
- Status of experiment including “launched,” “gathering data,” etc
- Experiment impact including tracked results
- Timing of test
- Owner of experiment, or POC
At Pinterest, engineering managers are responsible for maintaining this important document which not only helps keep track of everything in flight, but creates visibility across orgs. Experiment trackers also serve as a reference for why something was shipped, shut down, or paused, including impact that change had on key company metrics.
A closing thought: Always stay flexible.
Given our current situation when teams are shifting to working from home for an unknown amount of time, being able to adapt to ever-changing and unpredictable situations is a superpower that enables you to drive impact as an operations manager.
Here are two mantras that have reminded me to be flexible in my career:
Meet your team where they are
Maybe your team is using 50 different tools to track project progress. Perhaps overall documentation is inconsistent at best. You may have the perfect vision of how to streamline your team’s process, get everyone united on one tool and one process! However, in my experience, you can’t take a team from 0 to 100. You need to take your master plan and work on breaking it down and iterating towards an ideal future state.
Strong opinions, loosely held
Have a point of view, but be flexible. Start somewhere and be OK with it changing: it doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be fully fleshed out. Don’t let perfect get in the way of progress, even the smallest change can make a big difference.
As I’m sure many of you have experienced, companies and orgs constantly change and evolve. You may need to recreate the specific documents and processes mentioned above due to reorgs or shifting priorities, but returning to a foundation of empathy, alignment and visibility will help you with any operational challenge you may face. Good luck!
