The building blocks of operations
How to think about - and run - an organization
Hi all —
It’s been a while since I last wrote - I’ve been in the trenches trying to learn something. Coming up for air now after a month grappling with the next level of my career: Running stuff.
Up until now, I’ve been principally a doer. And I’ve loved it, because you figure out what’s real in the trenches. The experience finding product-market fit broke most of my assumptions about how to get from 0 → 1; I feel I can now filter out a lot of the noise when building new products thanks to concepts like “Demand”, “Shaping”, and “Unfolding”.
But now more of my attention is turning to the question: How does someone run a company?
Or run a department? Or even just manage another person?
As I’ve dug in, I’ve encountered the same frustrating lack of clarity that surrounds product-market fit:
The people who explain it haven’t done it
The people who do it can’t always explain it
Which means there are a lot of books, articles, and twitter threads about operations and management. But despite an overwhelming amount of information, I haven’t been able to find a coherent way to look at the whole thing.
After reading quite a few books, talking to executives and founders, and testing stuff out, my sense is that there are 4 interconnected “building blocks” that make up operations.
As a founder or executive, having these building blocks in your head will help you better assess what’s going right or wrong. It will also help you organize your “mental homepage” (or even your Notion homepage) for your department. Most importantly, it will help you see what’s missing - turning the “unknown unknown” into the “known.”
As you start to scale, getting operations in order matters a ton. You want to have your company operations mostly run themselves, and the right things happen by default, rather than you having to be everywhere and thinking on overdrive all the time. You don’t want to have to become a paranoid superhero to hold everything together. Trust me.
The Four Building Blocks of Ops
Disclaimer: I am aware that this is neither pretty nor catchy yet. I reserve the right to adjust this in the future and pretend this ugly version never existed.
The four building blocks are visualized below. This works at a team, department, or company level. (Slight revisions are needed for an individual level, but it’s close.)
There are four building blocks of ops, which interact with and reinforce one another:
What our team is responsible for
Our team’s goals
Which people own specific responsibilities and goals
The rhythms for how we communicate, meet, and act in service of achieving our responsibilities and goals
All of this is supported by context that makes the four building blocks intuitive for your team or company.
Why these four building blocks? After months of ruminating on this, trying a bunch of different things (my whiteboard nearly caught fire), this framework best fit reality. It represents simplicity on the other side of complexity. There are sub-components of each of these, which I’ll explain further. And it is far from MECE - these are highly related to one another, and the entire thing works as a system. This currently works in my head, so I hope it works in yours too. Please let me know if you have any better framework, or just poke holes in this, because I am ALL ears!
What comes next: I’ll go through each of the building blocks, using an example of a Customer Success org. More to come in future weeks exploring this framework further.
Building Block #1: Responsibilities
What are the main things we are responsible for? How do we do those things? How do we know if we’re doing a good job?
Responsibilities are at the core of what any person or team does. Your Customer Success department might be responsible for onboarding customers, training customers, addressing support requests, and renewing customers, for example.
Responsibilities are ideally outcomes-focused and customer-focused. Otherwise, this exercise tends to get deep into the weeds on relatively unimportant things.
These responsibilities have two critical supporting elements:
Playbooks: How do we execute against this responsibility?
KPIs: How do we know we’re managing this responsibility well?
In startups, it’s easy to lack playbooks or KPIs. As you grow and start hiring people, you need to be able to hand things off - and so playbooks, which dictate your repeatable processes, and KPIs, which tell you that everything’s working, are ways to audit and dictate without micromanaging.
When responsibilities aren’t being managed well, you’ll know thanks to clear KPIs and your org’s rhythm. And you can investigate whether something’s wrong with your playbooks, people, or something else - and you can set goals to improve lagging KPIs.
Rob’s aside: It took me a while to separate responsibilities from goals, but this was the big mental unlock for me: There are a core set of things that any person or team does, and we don’t want to set goals for all of them because that would create a TON of goals… which ensures nothing gets accomplished.
Building Block #2: Goals
Ah, goals. The thing everyone wants to talk about. Depending on who you ask, management by objective has either been the savior of, or the cause of, the inefficient corporate bureaucracy.
We love our OKRs. You might love your MSPOTs, your V2MOMs, your BHAGs, your North Star… or whatever other version of goals becomes popular next.
Goals are a way to say: Here’s where we want to be in the future, here’s how we’re going to get there, and here’s the metrics we’re tracking to make sure we’re heading in the right direction.
Goals, as I’ve written before, can be lethal. Before product-market fit, goals are distracting. And even after product-market fit, goal-setting is hard. It seems one can only set goals after paying $50k to a goal-setting consulting firm. Or smoking enough ayahuasca to speak directly to the ghost of Admiral Horatio Nelson (1st Viscount). Your choice.
Use whatever framework you want with goals. But make sure you add these two components to your goals:
Plans: Some sort of write-up on “how we’re going to achieve these goals”. Can be turned into your favorite project-tracking software or to-do list software, but the plan comes first. This is different than a playbook because playbooks are for repeatedly accomplishing things we’ve done before, while plans are to achieve things we haven’t achieved before.
Goal tracking: Some way to see if you’re on the right path to achieve your goals.
And keep these principles in mind when considering goals:
The fewer the better
Be ambitious
Rob’s aside: Building blocks #1 and #2 deal with “What gets done” and a little bit of “How it gets done”. Building blocks #3 (People) and #4 (Rhythms) are what makes #1 and #2 possible.
Building Block #3: People
Because it hasn’t yet proven practical to employ ferrets, we have to deal with people.
People make things happen. In your org, people own responsibilities and goals; they execute playbooks and plans. They come up with ideas that turn into new responsibilities and goals and playbooks and plans and rhythms. Or they don’t, and you have to find new people.
My experience managing people can be summarized as: “It’s hard.”
It’s hard to know why people are succeeding or failing, even harder to know if X could have been done better. But in startups, the biggest problem seems to be lack of clarity of who owns what.
In short, each person in your organization needs to know what responsibilities they own, which KPIs they contribute to, what goals they own and plans they contribute to. Use whatever framework you want: RACI, org chart, accountability chart, whatever.
You’ll only be able to have a hope of assessing someone’s performance when you clearly spell out what they own; you’ll only have a hope of achieving your team’s responsibilities and goals when everyone knows their piece in it.
Building Block #4: Rhythm
Rhythm is where everything comes together. It is HOW you run the organization: The cadence of meetings, communications, and activities that enable people to execute on their responsibilities and goals. The same cadence that helps keep everyone aligned, informed, planning, and achieving.
Each building block depends on your company culture to some extent, but Rhythm is the most culture-specific one. Some companies’ leadership teams just meet once per month and have formal, detailed plan reviews. Others meet weekly. Some executives like to send out weekly updates, others prefer
It is not clear to me whether there is one “right” rhythm, but having no clearly defined rhythm (complete with agendas for meetings/templates for reports) is a path to disorganization, frustration, and wasted effort.
So what’s your rhythm?
BONUS: Context
This is the category for “things that make Building Blocks 1-4 intuitive”, which is another way to say the Catch-All Category. What’s included in Context will depend on whether we’re looking at the building blocks at your company level or department/team level, and your preferred contextual tools.
Mission/Vision/Values. Strategy. Brand Guide. Your pitch deck. There’s a portfolio of things that you can provide employees so the “What” and “How” of work is intuitive.
All of that is Context.
That’s enough for now. PLEASE give me your feedback and reactions so I can make this better. More to come.