Who am I? Demystifying the operational role

A few years ago, I was interviewing at a company (who shall remain nameless) for a Technical Program Manager role. The job description matched the type of work I had been doing for years and it seemed like my personality jelled with the team members who interviewed me. After the 3rd and final round of interviews, the recruiter called me back and told me I didn’t get the job. The reason: I wasn’t “technical enough”.

Since I had been working in software for nearly twenty years, I was understandably confused. I asked the recruiter what qualifies as “technical enough” and she told me the hiring manager wanted someone with a computer science degree. “Oh”, I said, “I didn’t realize this was a coding job”. “It’s not”, she said, and that was that.

Sadly, I see this sort of thing all the time. Hiring companies know they have a need for a certain set of skills, but they don’t know how to label them and as a result, they try to solve the problem by applying the incorrect tool. In my travels, I have seen this job go by many names: Program Manager, Project Manager, Operations Manager, Producer, Development Director, and even COO, to name a few. Sometimes companies even try to cut corners by blending the role into another job, such as Product Manager, Engineering Manager or Business Analyst. This seldom leads to success, since the capabilities required by those roles are very different than what I am describing.

So, rather than describe the operational role with a title, I am going to do it based on skills and in priority order. A good operations expert should be able to handle some or all of these things with finesse, depending on their level of experience:

1. Talent Management— This is a critical skill. In this role, your best people are those who have a coaching nature and have managed teams effectively. They set measurable goals for team members and manage toward those goals. They are good motivators and know how to get the most out of anyone. This person may have few or no direct reports, but you can bet they will have a lot of influence over the other leaders on the team, regardless of their specific discipline. Often these people have some HR background and are very well-versed in regulatory compliance, disciplinary actions and recruiting.
2. Project Planning and Execution — Individuals in this role are experts at keeping projects on the rails. In fact, to continue the metaphor, they are usually instrumental in laying the track down in the first place. A lot of operations experts have certifications in domains like Scrum, SAFe, PMP and ASQ, to name a few. These certifications require a great deal of study and hands-on practice at mapping out project schedules, identifying dependencies and working with a team to execute in collaborative and transparent ways. Most people in this role also have the knowledge to oversee a major deliverable and ensure it is completed on time, on budget, and on quality. One of my Producers at Zynga oversaw the delivery of a very large game feature. This feature was a game changer (pun intended). She made sure the right team was on it and the project was properly scoped and budgeted, ran the daily standup, reported to the leadership team, tested it, launched it and ran the retrospective, all the while solving the many problems which arose during development. For those of us on the leadership team, the project was both low worry and low maintenance. Nine times out of ten, if you want to know the status of your projects at any given time, this person can tell you on the spot, unless of course they have already set up an automated reporting system for you.
3. Business Planning — Whether you’re heading up a brand new startup or a well-established business, chances are there is something lacking in your business operations and you may not even know it! Do you have an up-to-date P&L? When did you last audit your expenses? Is your current cloud service provider still right for you? Does everyone on the team have a career plan? Is your team organized for maximum efficiency? Who is going to staff that next project? How are your marketing efforts performing? Is customer service meeting KPI’s? Do they even have KPI’s? I could go on, but suffice to say an operations expert can audit a company and its team and build a robust roadmap of business optimizations you probably haven’t thought of. Startups, in particular, NEED someone in this role so the founder can focus on things like raising capital, building prototypes and marketing (schmoozing) to prospective customers. If you let them, this person will always keep the home fires burning.
4. Special Projects — Also known as “shit no one else wants to do” (or knows how to do in most cases). Remember Shawshank Redemption? There should be a person like Red on every team. He or she is the person who knows how to get it for you. Someone who is effective in this role will take a problem and simply run with it until it is solved, with a minimum of oversight needed. Not so long ago, I worked for a company that needed a set of HIPAA-compliant policies. I went out and became well-versed in HIPAA regulations and wrote the necessary policies. Someone had to figure it out, so I did.
5. Software Evaluation and Deployment — While a computer science degree may not be a requirement of the role, you better believe most of the best operations experts have worked with technology before. Whether it’s evaluating the best code repository, database infrastructure, game engine or project planning tool, these people have likely worked with many of them and can help select the best one to meet the needs of the team and the product. Any of us who have been through a software migration will tell you it can be a logistical nightmare. Fear not, an operations expert has you covered there too. They are capable of building a plan and a schedule to minimize interruption and make sure any tools you use are used properly. They can also periodically evaluate the tools in place and ensure they are still right for the job!

This list is hardly exhaustive, but it should give you a clear picture of the benefits provided by this role.

Reading all this, it’s not hard to understand why you can’t just blend this role in with another. Without exaggeration (because I have seen it happen numerous times), an operations expert can mean the difference between success and failure. At the very least, they can make your job a whole lot easier.

So if you are a leader and you’re missing an operations roadmap, you now have some knowledge to properly fill the role. Call it what you want, but rest assured you need this person (or group of people in many cases) because they will keep your business out of trouble more often than not!

Look for my upcoming book on Leadership in the Game Industry to be published in the summer of 2019. Subscribe to my blog for weekly updates: https://medium.com/total-kinetic and check out my website to learn more about my services: https://www.totalkinetic.com/.