Minimum Viable Operations
Just like great products and services, great teams should also enjoy a great experience. When you’re setting up a new team, and want to enable them to deliver value early and often, think about your team like people using a product or service to help you design a minimum viable operating model that sets everyone up for human-centred and agile ways of working
Great product teams have an essential quality that grounds what they do — they care deeply about understanding what people want and need. It’s their ability to connect this care and attention to customer outcomes to how they develop products that help differentiate what they do and sets them apart.
If you lead or are about to lead such a team, this care and attention to customer outcomes go just as much towards creating a great experience for your team as it does to your customers.
Focus on team outcomes before outputs
Much like your customers using your product or service, what do people in your team need to be able to do to be successful?
How can you point them in the right direction, free them from the unnecessary and enable them to work on the essential?
How can you start delivering value as early and often as possible?
Considering what each type of person must be able to do from an organisational, team and specialism level can help you think about how you best serve them.
In this article, I’ll show you a way to
- break down your team’s experience into the moments that matter
- consider what enables those moments and how to sequence them, and
- how to cut them down to their bare minimum to get started
So let’s start by thinking about the big picture, what journey will your new team member go on? What would that experience be like if it was exceptional? What are the key moments that matter?
Defining the moments that matter
Start by considering and prioritising the key moments that matter that someone on your team will experience.
Try and limit this to around 10–12 moments.
Typically these moments might include
- Being recruited
- Onboarding into the team
- Understanding the team’s mission and objectives
- Establishing ways of working
- Learning and development
- Gathering insights and finding opportunities
- Experimenting and testing ideas
- Planning and alignment
- Delivery of a product or service (or a Minimum Viable Product)
- Improving speed to market
- Securing funding and scaling
- Career Development
Now that’s quite a lot to think about, and given that your time will be limited it’s useful to consider the priorities in terms of what’s most valuable to be able to do for your team.
Depending on how big your list is It’s useful to group into higher-level themes to avoid getting drawn into the details.
Prioritise and Group
After a bit of prioritisation and grouping into themes, you might be left with these types of themes
Theme — Countdown to getting started
- Being recruited
- Onboarding into the team
Theme — Getting work-ready
- Understanding the team mission
- Establishing ways of working
- Learning and development
Theme — Establishing autonomy and purpose
- Gathering insights and finding opportunities
- Experimenting and testing ideas
- Planning and alignment
Theme — Creating impact
- Delivery of a product or service
- Improving speed to market
- Securing funding and scaling
- Career Development
Once you’ve had a first pass on the key themes, you may want to pause to consider any dependencies that need to be handled in a different way.
Dependencies on leaders
Consider each of these themes and moments that matter and ask yourself, what essential capabilities or enablers do you have to have in place to allow any of these to take place?
What bits of information, people, processes or technologies are essential?
For example, before you recruit people, you probably want to establish the problems you are seeking to address with this team and the team’s mission and vision to ensure it’s in line with your company strategy.
That overarching mission and the objectives and outcomes that signal that you have achieved the mission will probably also be pretty crucial to ensuring that you’ve identified and recruited the right people with the rights skills and capabilities to make that mission possible.
If you need funding, a cost model for those people will probably also be crucial to justify your business case and targeted return on investment.
On a more mundane, but also essential level, you may want to make sure that anyone who joins has licenses for remote collaboration software. You need to enable new joiners to collaborate and build a shared understanding of the outcomes you share as quickly as possible.
Dependencies on the team
Similarly, are there any outcomes that you want your new team members to own? What do you want them to have autonomy and a sense of purpose around?
For example, you may want to define the overarching mission and objectives of your team, but you may want your team to explore and select the best opportunities to achieve those objectives and have the freedom to create and test the best solutions to maximise impact.
Having a sense of dependencies will help you further refine the sequencing and relative priority of delivering these outcomes for your team.
Make the Cut
Once you have a view of what moments matter and the sequencing that will unlock value for your team, the next step is to make “the cut” and determine what you’re going to tackle first.
What’s the least amount of moments that matter you need to deliver in order to allow your team to get started delivering value for your customers?
Think about it as your Minimum Viable Operating Model.
Draw a big line that you can use to move moments that matter either side of, to see what you consider to have “made the cut” and what will be addressed later.
This step will take some discussion and iteration. It’s good to stress-test what you consider to be essential, as often it’s not. The trick here is to keep pruning the inessential until what’s made the cut no longer makes a coherent experience.
If you’ve taken something away that actually prevents your team member doing something, then it’s too much, so you may want to add something back in, especially if that something will take a long time to deliver.
For example, in the list above the ability to “Experiment and test ideas” is capability your team may not need on day one, but the ability to “Gather insights and find opportunities” will be important to start tackling from day one if you want to empower your teams to work autonomously to maximise your team’s objectives and outcomes.
Keep stress testing until you have a first cut that will get your team ready to operate and deliver the bare minimum towards your mission in the shortest time.
Ready?
There are a few final steps to help you achieve success once you have your final cut, and they are to make sure you’re clear on what success looks like for this first set of moments that matter.
Do you need to define them in any more details in terms of what people need to be able to do to get the most from these moments?
Is there some way you can measure and assess if those moments have worked out well if you need to learn and adapt what you’ve done?
For example, if we consider “Onboarding onto the team” you could break down this moment into a set of activities that you expect people to be able to accomplish to show that they have truly onboarded. This might include the following activities and measures of success.
- Activity — I can access our team’s instant messaging service and collaborate with others
- Measure of success — I’ve sent and received an instant message
Spend a little time breaking down each of these moments (or as they’re sometimes known “Epics”) into those activities you expect people to carry out (sometimes known as “User Stories”) and how you can tell whether people have managed to achieve those activities (sometimes known as “acceptance criteria”).
Once you’ve got your breakdown, you’re set and ready to go!
Set…. Go!
Remember - we’re trying to enable our team to deliver value early and often.
Trying to design the perfect operating model is going to get in the way of this.
We can get around this by applying the same principles to our team members as we would our customers, so they are able to maximise value within the team quickly. We want to get started so we can learn and improve what we do and how we do it.
You’ve considered the moments that matter for your team.
You’ve identified the activities to get the most out of those moments, and critical to the cycle of learning and adapting — the ways to assess whether those moments did, in fact, matter to them.
So, now it’s time to go and learn if these moments worked by checking your measures, identifying any bumps in the road that could be resolved next time around and start building a team that can focus on delivering value.
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