It would also be interesting to see examples of what terrible ops looks like. As one of the “kids”, here are some examples of things that were bad in previous projects I worked on (some mistakes for which I was responsible):
- getting obsessed with some bad metric (eg: number of people who come to an event) and spending lots of hours getting that number up instead of thinking about why I was doing that - so many meetings, calling a meeting if there’s any uncertainty about what to do next - there being uncertainty about what to do next because team members lack context, don’t know who’s responsible for what, who is working on what, etc— some people taking on too much responsibility and not being able to pass it on because having to explain how to do a task to someone else would itself take up too much time— very disorganised meetings where everyone wanted to have a say and it wasn’t clear at the end of it what the action steps were— an unwillingness for the person with the most context to take the role of explicitly telling others what concrete tasks to do (because the other team members were their friends and they didn’t want to be too bossy) - There not being enough structure for team members to give feedback if they thought an idea or project someone else was very excited about would be useless, as a result some mini-projects getting incubated that people weren’t excited about or projects that predictably failed because the person who wanted to do them did not have enough information to help them figure out how to avoid the failure modes other team members would have been concerned about (lack of sharing intuitions really well). also, people picking projects and tasks to do for bad reasons rather than via structured thinking about priorities - including too many people in meetings because “we’d love to get person X’s thoughts on our plans as well (and person Y and person Z...)” - it being hard to trust that other team members would actually get things assigned to them done on time, partly because it was difficult to see partial progress without having to ask the person how things were going - changing platforms and processes based on whims rather than figuring things out early and sticking with them
I think some of the things mentioned in the post are pretty helpful for avoiding some of these problems.
It would also be interesting to see examples of what terrible ops looks like. As one of the “kids”, here are some examples of things that were bad in previous projects I worked on (some mistakes for which I was responsible):
- getting obsessed with some bad metric (eg: number of people who come to an event) and spending lots of hours getting that number up instead of thinking about why I was doing that
- so many meetings, calling a meeting if there’s any uncertainty about what to do next
- there being uncertainty about what to do next because team members lack context, don’t know who’s responsible for what, who is working on what, etc—
some people taking on too much responsibility and not being able to pass it on because having to explain how to do a task to someone else would itself take up too much time—
very disorganised meetings where everyone wanted to have a say and it wasn’t clear at the end of it what the action steps were—
an unwillingness for the person with the most context to take the role of explicitly telling others what concrete tasks to do (because the other team members were their friends and they didn’t want to be too bossy)
- There not being enough structure for team members to give feedback if they thought an idea or project someone else was very excited about would be useless, as a result some mini-projects getting incubated that people weren’t excited about or projects that predictably failed because the person who wanted to do them did not have enough information to help them figure out how to avoid the failure modes other team members would have been concerned about (lack of sharing intuitions really well). also, people picking projects and tasks to do for bad reasons rather than via structured thinking about priorities
- including too many people in meetings because “we’d love to get person X’s thoughts on our plans as well (and person Y and person Z...)”
- it being hard to trust that other team members would actually get things assigned to them done on time, partly because it was difficult to see partial progress without having to ask the person how things were going
- changing platforms and processes based on whims rather than figuring things out early and sticking with them
I think some of the things mentioned in the post are pretty helpful for avoiding some of these problems.
This is a valuable list to have written up, thanks!