How to be Great at BizOps

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago, I joined the BizOps team at ZeroHomes - a tech-enabled HVAC service provider. While I had a vague idea of what the job looked like, I’ve been refining this idea through both my work and some readings. Here’s my current understanding, two weeks into the job.

Operating Cadence

A recurring theme in what I’ve learned from outside Zero but haven’t had the opportunity to enact in my day-to-day yet is the importance of setting up an operating cadence. Kevin Fishner puts it best as “If the system doesn’t surface the highest leverage improvements to make, it’s not a productive system.”

Core to the BizOps function is to create visibility into metrics and what’s driving those metrics. This involves creating a source of truth and then packaging those data to give teams the knowledge and resources they need to succeed.

Operating cadences usually happen at the weekly, quarterly, and monthly level. At the weekly level, this looks like giving teams the metrics that they’re trying to drive and creating space for them to make a plan of action to figure out how to drive those metrics to where they need to be.

At the quarterly level, this often involves more of the executive team to determine the bigger goals for the quarter and then translating those goals into OKRs for each team. And at the annual level, I’m not sure yet. When it comes to where BizOps can be successful, it’s largely in providing the raw materials and architecture for these planning sessions to be successful. And then helping with execution.

Building Data-Driven Systems

The operating cadence enables teams to identify where they need to improve. The next question is how. BizOps can also help here. By offering a data-backed perspective, BizOps can help identify where the bottlenecks behind a lack of metric improvement are. Then, the BizOps team can help with the operationalizing of systems meant to improve those metrics.

This has been a significant portion of what I’ve worked on so far at Zero. I’ve created and optimized a few processes during my first two weeks. Usually, this means finding better ways to share information between team members and then also create deadlines to ensure things move smoothly.

My competitive advantage

I’ve been looking for my competitive advantage at Zero. One thing I’m grateful for is that my niche as business-guy-who-can-code isn’t enough. I think this has been somewhat of a crutch for me in other roles as the business-guy-who-can-code is actually a super valuable place to sit when no one else can code. However, in a tech company, this competitive advantage doesn’t necessarily exist any more.

To that end, I’m looking to develop a competitive advantage in two ways: the first is systems thinking and the second is people management. When it comes to system thinking, this is something I’ve enjoyed in the past and have had great success with. By breaking down problems, using robust mental models, and then finding where I can make the most impact.

When it comes to managing people, this is something I’m honestly relatively new to. Even if it doesn’t become a competitive advantage, I need to get good at it. To me, managing people means horizontally finding ways to make people’s life easier and help them operationalize fixes to drive metrics forward. Very often, people aren’t huge fans of new solutions, and change management is hard. This is something I want to improve at.