As companies grow, scaling teams and delivery becomes a little—or a lot—more difficult. In the Bureau community, the general consensus is that systems thinking can help set people up for success. Looking back on Design Leadership Days, we gleaned operations insights from a wide range of different viewpoints. Some of the many highlights focused on org and design maturity, scaling delivery and aligning teams around OKRs.
Team Forming, Storming, Norming & Performing
In her session on containing chaos, Vox’s Brandy Porter spoke about the cycle of org maturity and Bruce Tuckman’s model of group development. At Vox, Mailchimp, WebMD and other organizations, Brandy has seen patterns emerge that are consistent with Tuckman’s four phases of group development:
Forming: Forming happens when people first get together. This can be a new company, product team or discipline team. People are excited. They’re getting to know one another. During Forming, ambiguity reigns.
Storming: In Storming, that initial politeness is gone. People start to notice flaws and, as they bring their opinions to the table, personalities can inevitably start to clash. During this phase, people have to figure out how to work together.
Norming: With Storming behind them, people begin to appreciate one another and how their skill sets complement. This is the stage where it’s good to document things, which can lead some people who love ambiguity to feel a little boxed in.
Performing: Performing is when things are running together like a well-oiled machine. With a clear understanding of how things work, everyone’s role and how everything fits together, there’s increased trust and better performance.
Regardless of size—five people, 500 or 5,000—org maturity tends to be cyclical. And, spoiler alert, the smallest change can send teams right back to Forming.
But change is inevitable and, as leaders, we can and should prepare for it. Brandy recommends settling into the Norming stage to document process and cultivate a resilient team. Bringing everyone into the fold makes it easier to determine efficient and more effective ways to work together.
Culture Follows Structure (& Vice Versa)
If the thought of “documentation” and “process” makes you itchy, worry not. It doesn’t have to be rigid. It can be fluid and ever-evolving. Above all, it should be your own.
So says Robert Sfeir, Head of Delivery, Global at Huge, Inc. Ask Robert what his favorite process is, and his response is simple: “The one that works.” In his session on scaling delivery, he offered strategies to help evaluate where you’re at and where you can quickly improve your chances of success.
Join Robert Sfeir in NYC, August 27-28, for his workshop, “Delivering in the Digital Age.”
When you implement a framework such as scrum, Agile or kanban, you inevitably change your culture. Thus, it’s important to be thoughtful about it. As Robert points out, culture and structure are connected. In a startup, structure follows culture—because the organization is small enough. But as an organization grows, the culture is going to follow the structure.
Robert offers three rules to help you design your delivery:
Stop implementing frameworks because they are “best practice” or popular
Spend as much time understanding how you work, as you would understanding your end user
Give the delivery experience the same consideration we give the product experience
Delivery is everyone’s job, so start with your team and start small. Have people collaborate and ask people to weigh in on how they work and where the pain points are.
Aligning Teams with OKRs
At Google, teams uses OKRs as a framework to ensure alignment on the business value of their work. Vivian Sarratt, Head of UX Operations, broke the acronym down in her talk on cross-functional collaboration:
The “O” (Objective)
The “O” is what you want to accomplish. It should be simple, realistic and aggressive, written as if it’s been written after the fact, i.e., “Product x successfully launched with 50 million 30-day active users.”
The “KR” (Key Result)
The KR is how you’re going to accomplish the “O.” Measurable and specific, it’s a North Star that focuses on the end outcome, without detailing all the steps in between, i.e., “Users generated $100 million in Q3 by using our new feature.”
Vivian recommends writing OKRs with your team in order to define and shape goals together, and avoid going off in separate siloed directions. Learn more about setting goals with OKRs.
Ops Thinking for Growth
How are you successfully growing your teams, process or organization—or what challenges could you really use some help with? Comment below or send us a note—let’s leverage our collective experiences to improve our organizations and the industry.