⚙️ The Ops Playbook #15

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Good Morning Operators ⚙️

Bitcoin hit $40K this week. Be prepared for BRRRR meme’s all over again.

While we wait for the onslaught of crypto bros, this is what we have in store today:

• AI Influenced Org Charts

• Scoring your Sales Leads

• Providing Unreasonable Hospitality

Let’s dive in.

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1. AI-Influenced Org Charts

Insight from One Useful Thing

Back in 1855, the New York and Erie Railroad needed a way to manage sprawling operations.

Their answer?

The first org chart, a beautiful, leafy diagram. If you remove the artistry, you get the modern organizational chart.

This style of org chart has remained largely unchanged for over a century and a half.

Each new wave of technology, from mechanical clocks to the internet, has brought new innovations. However, they are all built on human capabilities and limitations.

With the creation of AI, anyone can add intelligence to a project.

AI can:

• Independently analyze data

• Generate creative content

• Interact with humans to make decisions

This marks a fundamental shift in how work is organized and communicated. We are in the early innings of how AI will be used in organizations.

AI and human employees will collaborate in ways we cannot imagine.

To be able to rebuild organizations around AI, try building your org chart around these three principles:

1. Empower Teams to Develop AI Methods: Emphasize a bottom-up approach. Try to encourage teams to develop methods that suit their specific needs.

2. Differentiate between Agent and Process: You must determine where AI functions more like a team member than a software tool. Once you figure that out, you can work with department heads to divvy up resources.

3. Build for Future AI Advances: Organizations should design processes with an eye toward future AI developments.

2. Using Data to Score Leads

Insight from Mostly Metrics

DoorDash's rise isn't just savvy marketing; it's smart science. They've mastered the art of lead scoring, a method that sizes up potential leads not by gut feel, but by hard data.

The higher the value the account brings in, the higher the score. It's analytics meeting intuition.

You need to understand your business model to create your own lead-scoring system.

A major question you need to answer is where you will get the quality data to score the leads. A few ways to get this data is:

• How do your customers interact with your product?

• Are you able to buy data that you currently don't have?

• How can you adjust your product to get data that you haven't captured yet?

When Doordash first built its data model, the startup had to launch a feature where customers could request restaurants that they wanted onto the platform.

Eventually, Doordash combined customer search data with the most requested customer data to create their sales pipeline.

3. Unreasonable Hospitality

Insight from Unreasonable Hospitality

When a customer’s parking meter is about to expire, what should a restaurant owner do?

Be like Will.

If you don’t know Will Guidara, he is infamous for the ridiculous levels of hospitality at his restaurants like Eleven Madison Park.

Eleven Madison Park is continually ranked one of the best restaurants in the world. Many credit this ranking to always over-delivering for the customer.

As leaders of organizations, we’ve all struggled with getting our teams to provide an amazing experience to our customers.

How does Will do it?

He prides himself on recruiting those who might lack experience but bring 100% enthusiasm to the work they do every day.

Will has correctly determined that people WANT to do great work. They just need to find their zone of genius.

He hyper-focuses on the details of how his team conducts themselves. A perfect example is when Will said…

Why would Will do that?

By asking the person setting the dining room to place each plate with total concentration, Will was asking them to set the tone for:

• how they’d do everything over the course of the service

• how they’d greet our guests

• pour the champagne to begin a meal and the cup of coffee to end it.

Sloppiness has a way of spreading.

4.  A Unique Twist on Return to Office (RTO) Policies

Insight from Safe From Work 

I heard that a company with over 500+ employees botched their return-to-office policy last week. The company demanded that all employees come to the office 5 times a week.

The company's execs thought the team would be ecstatic to hang with their coworkers.

Instead, resignations came flying.

Especially among the most talented folks.

The cream of the crop has the best options.

That’s the world we live in.

Most executives aren’t solving for the most important consequence when implementing an RTO policy.

Mandating an RTO will result in your highest performers leaving.

If you are a top performer told to return to the office, then you think the company does not trust you to finish your work (even though they come in with the highest company reviews).

We should balance the company's needs with top performers' desire for flexibility.

How about allowing high-performers to unlock new perks on top of the standard RTO policy?

You could create a program that allows employees at the top 25% percentile for the past two performance cycles to apply for an exception to the RTO policy for, say, up to 3 months out of the year.

Policies are necessary to establish guidelines for large groups of people. However, they are designed for the lowest common denominator out of necessity. Policies should be designed knowing that decisions will affect people differently.

And top performers will not respond well to being treated like serfs by their company.

Who would say no to that?

Operators Library

• Atlassian researched the top challenges with distributed work. This is what they found (Link)

• You spend 60% of your budget on people. You need to optimize it (Link)

• Building RevOps Operating Cadences (Link)

• Udemy founder regrets discounting at Udemy (Link)

• Marketing case studies on the latest trends (Link)*

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