The Color-Coding Exercise to Unlock Your RevOps Career Growth

Sean Lane 0:04 Hey everyone, welcome to operations, the show where we look under the hood of companies in hyper growth. My name is Sean lane. Way back in one of our earliest episodes of this show, episode nine to be exact. Our guest Sylvia kinds said something about operators that has stuck with me for years. She said, quote, the last thing operators want is to be pigeonholed. There are actually people who like working across the organization, they thrive on that. They like talking to business owners and translating requirements to the technical team. They like to go broad instead of necessarily deep part of their career development is to say you've done marketing ops and marketing project management for almost a year, let's expand your scope. They get super excited about that. And they learn. They're the type of employee who likes to learn, who likes to stretch their mind, they love to better understand the organization, and how all those pieces are fitting together. And if you can get that right mindset, you can get an awesome team. That's a pretty great quote, right? And yet, it's super common for operators to get pigeonholed into a specific ops function or tied to a specific internal leader or an area of ownership. On today's episode, I'm going to walk you through an exercise that you can do yourself or with your teams to guarantee you avoid this pigeon holing problem, and more importantly, institutionalize the ongoing development of your team and their skills. All right, so let's dig into this. Chances are your company has some sort of performance review or leveling process that you use to give feedback, facilitate career growth, and so on. First of all, these processes are great, but they're likely insufficient for your DevOps team for a few reasons. One, they're usually company wide exercises. So they aren't as specific to DevOps as they could be. And to, they're typically more about competencies and titles and promotions, than they are about the actual work that we do and rub ops. Now, I am not saying performance reviews aren't important. They absolutely are. I'm just saying they don't accomplish everything you need to ensure that you and the individuals on your team are getting the growth opportunities that you all need to thrive. So what's the exercise that I'm talking about? Well, it's a color coding exercise. Here's how it works. You start with a list of Reb ops focus areas, managing your tech stack metrics and reporting comp planning, capacity planning, training and enablement forecasting cadences, I'll share the full list of nine categories, and a long list of subcategories. And a link in the show notes. Once you have your list, each member of your team will color code the focus areas on the list based on their preferences, skills, and most importantly, their desire to learn. So here's how the color coding might work. One category is I like doing this type of work. And I think I'm good at it. We're going to code that category green. Next you might be I do not like doing this type of work, but I think I'm good at it, we'll make that one yellow. Third, I like doing this type of work and I want to get more exposure to get better at it, we'll make that one blue. Fourth, I don't like this type of work and I don't have any interest in it, we'll make that one red. And lastly, I don't know if I like this type of work. But I want to learn more, we'll make that one orange. These categories create a clear picture of where each team member stands and what they aspire to do, you will very quickly be able to get a sense of the individual strengths, preferences and areas of interest for your team as well as their areas of potential growth. For the individual who's filling it out. It's a great tool for self reflection and career planning. And doing the exercise will prompt meaningful conversations about that individual's growth and their preferences. On the manager side and for the company. This is a phenomenal way to staff your team based off of finding the existing blind spots, and it ultimately makes it easier to align the personal development of the individual with the company's needs. My colleague, Laura Aden, and I introduced this exercise with our operations team at Drift, we would ask our teams to refresh this list twice a year, we would alternate the quarters with when the company wide performance reviews happened also twice a year. And what this exercise is prompted were amazing conversations with our team members. And I was always shocked at how the color shifted every time we refresh the list. When we would come out of these conversations, both the leaders as well as the individuals could reference these focus areas all the time to identify relevant projects for each person to go back and do and make we made sure that those projects were already part of our broader DevOps goals. For example, Someone might have color coded the territory planning category. As I don't know, if I like this type of work, and I want to learn more. So then we make an effort to include that person in the next territory planning exercise. Now, they might come back the next time around with that color coded as red, I do not like this type of work, and I don't have any interest in it. That's okay. Now everybody knows that. On the flip side, if nobody on the team has a strong interest or a skill set for an area like compensation design, now, it's become clear to me that we need to bring in someone to fill that gap and make sure we have that expertise on the team. The important part here is the exposure, everyone gets the learning that happens and the growth that happens along the way. Now, I get it, you might be listening to this saying, my team is not big enough for this level of specialization, or I just have to do everything on this list. Because of the bandwidth constraints put on me by my company. What I would say to you is you can still use this exercise for two reasons. One, you can determine the scope of responsibilities of yourself and your ops team. So what are you ultimately responsible for? And what are you not responsible for. And to this will help you to plan ahead when you are hiring so you can know your blind spots, and you can know the skill sets that you're going to need to complement the existing team members. Not to mention, you and your teammates will appreciate this exercise. For a simple list with just a bunch of colors on it. It's pretty thought provoking, and it's gonna serve as a catalyst for meaningful and potentially career changing conversations. As Sylvia Kahn said, operators are the type of employee who liked to learn who liked to stretch their mind, they love to better understand the organization and how all the pieces are fitting together. And if you get that right mindset, you can get an awesome team. I don't know about you, but how can you hear that and not want to surround yourself with that type of people? All right. Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode. You can steal this exercise for yourself from the shownotes there's a link there with the entire list of categories as well as a whole bunch of subcategories. If you liked what you heard today, make sure you're subscribe to our show, so you get a new episode in your feed every other Friday. Also, if you learned something from this episode, or from any of our episodes, please leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts six star reviews only. Alright, that's gonna do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.