Welcome. I am so excited to have you here. Would you just introduce yourself a little bit? Yeah. Hi, Jen. Thanks for having me. My name is Alex Armstead. I am a business operations professional. I work at a company called Clever, which is in the K through 12 education tech space.

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I've been at the company for almost nine years. So like really loved the company, loved what I do and where I get to. Nine years. Nine years. It's crazy. I'm like, I'm a unicorn in the tech world.

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Started my career actually as a support professional. Well, actually started as a high school band and orchestra teacher. So hard to. That's great.(...) Well, it's K through 12 education. Exactly. Yes, exactly. So moved into the tech space as a support agent.(...) Ended up really loving that space and moved into management and then really realized I had an affinity and a passion for supporting people behind the scenes internally, which BizOps gets to do every day. Instead of unlocking support for external customers, basically the support team for our internal customers here at Clever. That's really cool.(...) And I think that connects the dots for us, right? Cause our listeners are support managers and customer services teams. And so you are essentially supporting those teams. Am I getting that right? Exactly. My business partners, the people on my teams, they bring me problems and I'm there to come and bring solutions. It might be a recommendation. It might be a new process. It could be data to help unlock maybe a question that they have, but in the end, it's the same line of work. Little puzzles every day. It's just internal versus an external stakeholder.

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Yeah. And you know, you describing your history has me thinking I could do 10 podcast episodes with you because especially right now with AI taking a lot of support jobs, I think people more and more, actually, let me say it this way. With AI taking the easier support conversations, a lot of people in support are looking to get more advanced and to specialize and maybe move into ops like you have. But I don't think that's what you're here to talk about today, maybe another time. What is the process that you'd like to share with us? Yeah. So today I would love to talk about how you build a really psychologically safe organization and build relationships between leadership and individuals to really unlock, I think what you're talking to there, which is a more advanced organization and just a more mature organization on how you server your customers every day. That's fantastic. So I know you have some steps worked up for us. You have some ideas. What's, so if you're just starting out on this journey, what's the first thing that you would do to start building that team?(...) The first thing is you gotta hire the right people.(...) And by people, I mean that leader. You know, I think so often, especially in tech, we see especially a smaller companies, people that bring in people that are really good at their functional expertise, but aren't necessarily the greatest people leaders themselves. Meaning who are those people that would be an amazing person to work for regardless of the job function?(...) Hopefully you want that person that also knows how to bring the best support possible for customers. I think that brings up for me a thing I've heard a lot is you can teach technical skills, but people skills are harder to teach and it's important to hire for those.

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So how do you do that? What's the key to finding those people? So I think first and foremost, it's a lot about your interview process and how you actually bring that, you can describe that role in the job description. All the time we see a lot of qualifications about hitting KPIs or being able to maybe wrangle your zen desk or intercom instance, but not nearly enough do you see something about developing talent, creating an engaged and excited team with long retention. I think those just line items in the JDs are often missing, but are really critical to finding someone that is people first and not just process and support first.(...) Yeah, so that starts with the job description and it starts with leadership. And then from there, you're hiring the rest of the team for that people centered perspective.(...) Absolutely. I think the second thing is once you have someone in C, we often have expectations of what someone needs to be doing in their role when it comes to individual contributors.

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And I think often when you're coming in a leadership role, I have that 90 day plan, right? How are you going to integrate with your team in the first 90 days and how are you going to make sure that that team is set up for success?(...) Often at a company, we see that there are consistent expectations for individual leaders at the company, so ahead of this group or that function. However, there's not often definitions that are consistent and have a very clear expectation of what the company's ethos and expectations is for a manager. So what do we expect of a leader or of a model or someone who is a great coach, regardless if they're in engineering, finance, or in support?(...) So this is really a company wide effort to set expectations for people centricity or?

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Exactly, I'm like good leadership does not foster itself within a silo, right? Like I need you, Jen, like, because I'm not going to have an answer to everything at my company, right? I'm going to go into that leadership channel on Slack and ask a question when I have something that maybe I'm just not good at, I don't know how to necessarily guide someone through that friction point or that pain point that they have, right? But if I can lean on all the other leaders at my company who are also people centric and are just wanting everyone to be successful professionals that want to stay at that company as long as possible,(...) that is going to allow me to have that community that we often find and support external of our own companies, right, like look at all of our communities that we build around support leadership. I love that they exist, but I want everyone to have that same leadership community within their own company as well.

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Yeah, and so if you're at a company where maybe that's not quite where you want it to be, do you have advice for how to build that leadership culture in a company where maybe you came in and your task is to shift it a little bit? I think it's important for you to look at who is in those executive positions around you and especially within your people operations or your HR team, because really there needs to be a function or an executive sponsor at your company who's going to make sure that you're not doing it alone, right? There needs to be someone who's going to say, we're going to help recreate programming on how to be an excellent people leader. We're going to make sure that we get together in study groups and talk about a concept and revisit it a few months later to see how it's going and go on this journey together. The most impactful thing I ever did was go on a full two year leadership journey with a cohort at my company where we tackled one model at a time taking various aspects of leadership, whether it be communication or conflict modes or how do you foster a growth plan? It was by going through that step by step with the people around me, but of course led by someone who could focus on that full time, which unfortunately I can as a support leader, right? And so you need to have an executive leadership sponsor who can help ensure that the entire company makes a space and builds the time in order to build and maintain these spaces for the leadership.(...) Okay, that's fascinating to me. This whole leadership journey that you went on with modules, was that a course that you took or something someone on your team created?(...) Yeah, so it was, we did hire some external resources who have expertises in coaching leadership and this was really focused on middle management. You know, executive coaching is separate of just being a great people manager itself. And so we did focus on what does it mean to be in the middle because so often a support manager, whether it be the director or even someone, a direct line support manager or lead, often they feel pitted in between the individual contributors that they are passionately trying to support and the priorities of the directors and executive level. And so having something focused not just on executive leadership, but middle management, which is a skill of and of in and of itself, I think is really key.

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Executive coaching is a thing you can hire out. And also this sort of leadership coaching, two separate things, right? Completely separate. Okay, can you just tell me a bit about that? Because you don't have to be a manager to be a great leader, right? So a lot of the same lessons that we often throw at just our leaders that are a leader and title, really should be made available to anyone that is an mature role or in a higher level of organization, even if they're just an individual contributor. I'm a great example. I formally was the head of support, but in what I do in business operations now, I'm just a really high level individual contributor. I don't manage anyone, but I have incredible influence and impact over my organization.(...) As a result, I need to have those same great communication and leadership and change management skills as a director or a head of in order to be effective in my role. That's a really interesting point because I think there, we're kind of exploding that model right now from the past of individual contributors and then managers and then middle managers and then execs. And your role is a good example of how individual contributors can be at a very high level and have a lot of impact and need a lot of that leadership coaching without even a direct report, like you said.(...) And I think it either becomes more critical if you have a team that is highly engaged and you have longer tenure because you're not always going to be able to open up new leadership roles that are management in order to allow someone to continue to grow within your organization. Yeah, can we dig into that for a minute? I'm sorry, I interrupted you, but that's fascinating to me. I've been at teams where, you know, and I've been in that position where I've been somewhere for, you know, six or seven years and I haven't moved past individual contributor, but maybe, you know, I've, I've known people too who maybe didn't want to, but still wanted to grow.

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What's, what's possible there?(...) So often what I try to lean into is what I call strategic projects, right? And so how do you give someone that is not just managing writing new articles of product, but actually giving them true business challenges of how do we scale this product, right? So say we have a hundred customers that use this product and 20% of them write in every year, give them a strategic project to say, how can we reduce that to only 10% over the next 12 months, right? Give them an open-ended business problem and allow them to think about all the rich solutions that they might be able to take in order to influence that result. Those are things that people get really excited about and are really meaningful rather than just checking the box on a project that's almost pre-planned for them. Yeah, meaningful because it affects revenue, right? Exactly. And I'm not saying that we don't need people doing those more entry-level projects that are checking the boxes, keeping things up to date. Those are absolutely mission critical to keeping the lights on and customers happy.

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But when you start getting to that six or seven year mark, people need something that allows them to really stretch themselves and think creatively and not be so prescriptive about what you're asking them to do. I feel like this ties right into your topic of building trust because your individual contributors know that you've got their back and you're thinking about their long-term life cycle and their needs as an elder employee.

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I love that, yeah, an elder employee, for sure.(...) People can only tackle nebulous projects, especially if they have an influence on the bottom line, such as revenue, retention, churn, things of that nature. They can only do that if they know that they can fail or not succeed, right? I often talk about things all the time. There's different than a compensation goal, something that you might be literally tied to the dollars that come into your checking account versus what are things that regardless if the metric follows, the inputs were absolutely right and necessary and good for us long-term, right? So we often have a framework that we use at Clevver that we try to think about every decision or thing that we do through the lens of is it good for the customer? Is it good for the business? Is it good for the team? And if you can say yes to all three of those, it's okay if you actually fail when it comes to the metric because the systems that you set up, the processes that you create, the data that you get as a result all informs how you're going to adapt in the future, but you just set yourself up with a great base point to start and you're better than when you started because guess what? You just did something that was good for all three parties. I love that. That's fantastic. And so, um, and it highlights too how that highlights how something can be good for the customer, but not good for the business. Like if you decide to give away your product for free, right? Um, and then the business doesn't exist. Ultimately, that's not good for the customer anymore. And so they're all kind of these levers that have to work together. Absolutely. And, you know, and sometimes that is a difficult skill to teach to support agents because they have so much ethos for people that are on the front line. So zooming out and thinking about the actual business impact and what we need to accomplish for whether it be your private equity partners. It could be just people that are shareholders. Like in the end, this has to be a profitable business. If not, no one gets paid and you can't be doing the good work for the people in the end. So that's good for no one. Exactly. So sometimes you have to go out of the things that seem obvious and are really feel good to the things that actually have a broader impact because it in the end allows our company to exist and provide this great service to those that we have so much empathy and passion for. Yeah. And that really touches on, I think advancement. So we were talking about people staying at individual contributor level roles, but how do you, whether it's as an IC or moving up to management and middle management, how do you empower your team to know, I guess, how, what the path is at your organization? Cause I think that really builds trust. Yeah. So at most mature companies, you should have some form of an actual career pathway, like document or artifact, right? So something that says here is generally what is available to you based off of each stage of your journey. So for example, at clever, we do not generally see people going directly from a support position to a customer success manager, just based off of our company(...) and our needs and the maturity of our different organizations. It makes more, much more sense for us and for the success of that individual coming into the seat to go from support to our onboarding and implementation team to then going into success. And you know, but you know, just because you can, are really great at technical support, it doesn't mean you can think about the actual realities of being about a CSM, you know, I think that often part of beyond having those career pathways explicitly drawn out, it's really being able to describe what does the day today look like in each of these roles? Because being a CSM is not just getting to talk to customers and having a great time, it is absolutely having a goal behind the scenes of how you want to grow the business and in which manner and influencing customers to hopefully agree that that is a win-win for them as well. Right. And so there are a lot of metrics and strategies and motions that happen that you know, you being in support may not realize, but are actually part of the innate pressures day to day of being a customer success manager.(...) So just an aside about that, it sounds like your team really prioritizes promoting from within the team. And it seems like that's probably,(...) that saves you a lot of, frankly, money on acquisition of external team members, like bringing somebody in. Is, am I getting that right? Yeah. Hiring is so expensive, Jen. I like, even if you don't know that right out there, hiring is extremely expensive. Retention is the best play possible, whether it be in the same seat or moving within the organization, that internal mobility, but recruiting and hiring great people is very difficult, especially in this tech market, right? So if you're in tech right now, any, and you're hiring any role is going to have well over a thousand applicants in less than seven days. Oh, that's painful. Yeah, it's painful. It's hard. It's there. In good news, Jen, there's like a lot of great people that are applying, right? We, there's a tremendous talent pool that you get to pull from, but it takes time and money and energy on both sides of the spectrum in order to get someone and seat. And so for us, we really do love promoting from within because we do want long-term retention, you know, the, the relationships and the product knowledge and everything else that you bring from each and every role allows you to scale into that next role even faster, right? I think so often we focus solely on just the product knowledge. Well, being a great success manager, if we keep using that position, it takes more than just knowing the product and what it can do for a customer. You also need internally to have relationships with people in product and engineering and marketing, and you establish those in every single role within the organization and if supports not getting those relationships in the organization, I encourage you as a leader to think about how you can make those available because having that full team to support the customer, not just the support team supporting the customer really does make a difference in an impact.(...) So how, if you are able to share, do you have examples of how you connect to your support specialists to other teams to build that sort of cross-functional knowledge?(...) Yeah. So unfortunately we can't always make it happen for every single team, support team member, but an example for us is that we have three frontline managers that are working to directly manage our support team members and we have each of them aligned with a different prod engineering team. So we have multiple product and engineering teams based, focused on different features and aspects of our platform.(...) And so we have a manager that is there to just make sure that we're not only bringing voice a customer, but bringing back updates and building relationships. And we always bring some of our more senior people that serve as stakeholders for those conversations. So that manager is bringing to every product and engineering meeting, which also has a marketing person in it. You know, they're bringing two or three senior people from their team and rotating them as necessary based off the topics to ensure that others are getting exposure and the support team member not only gets to share their expertise, but build those relationships and understand again, more of what other people do at the company and what they care about.

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Yeah, that's brilliant. I love that, that model. And it sounds like to, um, that makes that pathway really clear. So I'm on the support team. I know that I'm expected to contribute, especially as I get more experience. And then I know if I want to move forward in my career, move upward, then I might go over to onboarding. Um, and so I'm going to build the skills needed for that. And probably that's part of your pathway, right? Is like what skills are needed.

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Absolutely. It's what skills are needed. And just also how does someone want to grow? Because maybe you're a great support agent, but based off of your life and how much newness you can tell it any one time, because remember you got to keep the personal life and the professional life in balance, right? So if my personal life is a little crazy right now, I may be happy to staying in seed and not having newness in my professional life, but if you're ready for newness, it could be a brand new role. It could be just new opportunities. Right.

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Um, and something that I love even internally here is, uh, you can build opportunities internally within the role by just building bandwidth. So, uh, speaking of like, we talked about psychological safety and a long time ago, I know we're getting a lot onto professional development here, but something that we do at our company, because we've developed a lot of psychological safety is we actually do peer to peer quality assurance reviews. So though we have quality assurance specialists that are dedicated full time to, uh, coaching and mentoring our team members, um, working with customers. We also do peer to peer grading where, you know, you and I might be assigned to each other that week number review three of your customer interactions. And you'll review three of mine and we share our insights and learnings. Well, eventually that program doesn't become as effective as effective as someone gets, you know, four to five years into the role. You know, it turns out if you do something for four to five years, you're typically pretty darn good at it. And so what we do is we actually graduate people out of peer to peer. And that builds the opportunity for them to become something like a project, a product and engineering sponsor to be in those conversations because they're no longer spending that time, hour and a half each week in peer to peer grading. But instead they're getting to work more with product. Right. It's that part of that pathway. So it's not just a pathway from support to onboarding. It's a pathway within support. So as I mature as an agent, then I, I get more responsibility essentially. And, and maybe a little less oversight. Exactly. And that's the beautiful thing about internal activities versus external activities. We always have to respond to customer requests. That is never going to change, but internally you can always be revisiting. Why are we doing this? Is it still having a positive impact? And if it's not, should we still be doing it right? Are we doing it just for the sake of rinse and repeat, or that's always the way we've done it, or is this a great opportunity for think about how we can continue to grow and mature and find better opportunities to really become the best organization we can be. Do you think there's an ideal proportion there between internal and external activities for an individual contributor, a specialist who is maybe 50% in the queue with customers and 50% working on internal projects, or is there a different percentage that you think works best? Oh, good. That's a tough one, Jen, especially because every company has a different staffing model, right? We're, we're getting the nuts and bolts of staffing models here. And, you know, at Clever, like I can share, like we shoot for a 70% utilization rate. So 70% of time being spent on customer facing activities, and that's inclusive of time and meetings or out of office, you know, get people on vacation. They don't need to be in the queue 24 seven, right?

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And so I think in the end, we aim to have our agents working on external things about five hours a week, so about one hour per day on other activities. And we find that as long as they get an hour of meaningful activity, that's not focused on just work in the queue, that that's often meaningful enough to start building those skills that will eventually get them to be able to tackle some of those really interesting strategic projects that we were talking about. That's really interesting to know how different, different teams run that.

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Just to shift gears a little bit, I know we had talked a little bit about surveys and how those can build trust. Can you just launch me into that? Absolutely. So I'm a big proponent of before you can have really candid in the moment(...) psychological safety and conversations.(...) First, you need to be able to trust as that people leader, as we talked about, hiring(...) leadership that are people centric that also have those functional skills. But then after that, finding ways for people to before they maybe have that full relationship with you, really provide feedback in a way that is psychologically safe. I get to keep using that, but also just maybe a little bit more anonymous.(...) So we're really lucky here at Clever that we have a tool called CultureAmp that allows us to regularly provide surveys to our team members, whether it be just at the support level or at the company level that allows them to purely and anonymously provide feedback to our team. And so that could be about their manager. It could be about our business strategy. It could be about how they feel about their position.(...) But as much as we love Google surveys and things of that nature,

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there are tools out there that just give you much more rich and robust data. So like CultureAmp, for example, it allows us to automatically collect without identifying the individual tenure, for example. Right. So how is the sentiment for those that are in their first year versus three years versus five plus years? How are we doing against our male versus female dynamics or non-binary? Right. And so though you can collect all that stuff in person, if you collect that email address in a Google form, it's a lot better if you can collect it behind the scenes while maintaining anonymity by grouping by cohorts. Right. So this platform, for example, will not build a cohort if it's less than four people. Right. So knowing that every cohort has at least four people really reduces the chance that someone feels like they're going to be outed in some way for the feedback that they might be providing.(...) Which absolutely squashes feedback, because if I feel like I give any, if I give negative(...) feedback, then I'll be punished for that in some way or singled out, then I'm absolutely not going to do that. No, absolutely. I'm like, it's one thing to leave a score, but especially if you're like the most rich data that you get are the comments. But so often, if it's a small team, those comments are not going to come because they're too worried about you recognizing their tone. Especially in the support world, right? In support world, you see a lot of their written or verbal communication, whether it be just working with them or actually monitoring their cases or listening in on a phone conversation.

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And so actually, for people, leaders out there, I highly recommend if you want to encourage comments, encourage your people to throw any of their written feedback into an AI and give it something like make it more formal, change the tone, and just change up that wording, right? Because it's going to move it just enough that it's not going to sound like Jen anymore. It's going to sound like Matt, I don't know, or someone worded. That's brilliant. And it never would have occurred to me. I love that. Exactly. And we encourage our people explicitly to do that because we know that we want to contextualize those numbers. And the only way we can do that is by getting those written comments that often people are too afraid to leave because they feel that their personal tone or how they write something might be, you know, outed. Yeah, that brings tears to my eyes, just the dedication that your team has to really listening(...) to anonymous feedback and making sure that it really is anonymous. That's it's just so supportive of the individual. Well, it happens because we actually do stuff about it. Often there's a surveys and you never hear the results or hear the results, but there's no action planning, you know, and so every time we do those surveys, the next thing that we do is that we look at it as a leadership team. And then we say, hey, what are our biggest areas of opportunity? What are the biggest things that we need to continue doing? I think we don't often talk enough about the things that are going great and we need to double down on. And then we take those to the team and then we go one step further. So we don't just ask them, well, how we like things changed, but we actually build little action planning teams. So say we have three things on things we want to work on, you know, item A, B and C. We then have, you know, one leader as the sponsor for each of those initiatives. But we actually then bring in three to 14 members that are on that action planning committee so that it is the team itself, not just management coming up with solutions and how we're going to move forward and make things better. Because, yeah, you need everyone. Like improvement is everything.

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Yeah. And it sounds like that mirrors what you said earlier about product teams and a support manager bringing in three or four of their reports to help with product and on that cross-functional team. It sounds like that's a model that works really well. I really do think so because not only do you get more voices in the room, but that is a coaching moment. Right. So as a manager, you're coaching team members on how to think, well, that's a great idea. But have you thought about this thing that we're going to need to tackle as a result? Right. This effect, right? The cause and effect, right? Or it's really interesting when a support team member first gives product feedback, you know, so they're constantly logging that voice of customer. Well, they may not realize how a product or engineer might think about that feedback and how they might interpret it. So actually getting those voices in the room and hearing how different teams think, what values they bring to the table, what their priorities are, they need to experience that firsthand. I can't teach them this by just telling them, well, product wants to know how it relates to ARR, right?

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Because, you know, support team members just don't resonate with that. But what they do resonate is, hey, I know Jeremy, he's a really nice guy. He's the product manager for this area.(...) I get to hear his words and how he thinks about it directly from him. And it just kind of is a light bulb moment for them often. Just get them in the same room, just hearing and thinking through things in a different perspective in a way that they can't do if you just silo support team members by themselves.

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It really strikes me how your efforts to build trust really seem to go hand in hand with building the support specialists abilities and skills and cross-functional connections. Like it seems like those just really are almost the same.(...) Exactly. I'm like, I want someone who is more than just a support agent who regurgitates answers and solves tickets.

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I want someone that can solve business problems. And again, similar to how I talk about business ops being a space, a support team member, but internally, I want an agent to be the same thing. I want them to just be a universal problem solver, whether the problem is brought to them by a customer or whether it's brought by their manager as a great business problem that they can work on as a strategic project. And that's what you did moving from support to business ops. You are like you said, you basically do the same thing just for a different audience, different group of people. Different audience, just more time and more experience, right? Is by scaffolding all those day to day and quarter to quarter experiences and just having that exposure, those conversations with the product managers of the world that slowly allows you to tackle the bigger and bigger problems.

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Yeah. And I know we are coming up to the end of our time and you have a couple more things to share with us, I think about monthly Q and A's and then also retrospectives, I think we talked about after busy seasons. Yeah, exactly. So the other two things that have I think been really pivotal for our team, just really unlocking our fullest potential is, as I mentioned, we do monthly Q and A sessions with support leadership and with the teams itself. So we actually have a really cool tool internally that we use at Clever that allows them to submit feedback, whether anonymous or their name attached. And then there's actually voting and you can add comments and we answer those directly live in our team meeting. So we reserve 30 minutes out of our hour to just tackle those challenges straight on, you know, and it's a little awkward at first, you know, they sometimes wonder like, can I ask that question? But by allowing people to upvote and submit anonymously as first and just seeing that, hey, you can see the list of all the questions that were submitted and we're going to answer every single one, whether it be right now, verbally or following up written, just really engenders that, hey, anything can be asked and you can even ask things twice. Right. I can't tell you the number of times at a company level, you know, we've asked our team about matching 401k, you know, it hasn't happened, but doesn't mean we don't keep asking that question. Right. And so support team members might have the same question about,(...) hey, do we really need to be on two hours of support phone shifts or do you think you're finally going to open that third spot for a new quality assurance specialist? Right. So there might be things that are, yeah, not yet, but thank you for asking. Right. But in the end, there are a lot of great questions that come in, but I think too often we don't create regular forums to people to ask questions. We assume that people will bring their questions in one on ones. Well, there's something that is really strong about having the support of your peers around you standing by you when you ask a question.(...) Yeah. And I think sometimes in one on ones,(...) individual contributors can feel a little bit like they're still being graded. Like I still need to impress my manager so I can get, you know, a promotion eventually. And so that gives it a completely anonymous space for that to happen. So I love that. It sounds a little one on ones are intimidating. Right. So like, so if you want, maybe the answer can't be answered by your frontline manager. Maybe it is the director or a VP that needs to answer that. Well, that's even more intimidating. Do you really want to put that time on their calendar? Do you know, do you know how you want to say it? Maybe you really just want to put it in that chat BTT and say like, make this more clear and more concise. Right. So nice thing about having a written Q and a upfront, it's not only that it's a less intimidating, but it allows both sides to prepare you. The question asker gets to prepare how they want to ask it so they can be more thoughtful to make sure that they're probing for the right answer. And then also the person who wants to answer the question, they can be more thoughtful because guess what? Most leaders don't know every single answer off the cuff, right? Maybe they actually need to talk to an HR specialist about something, you know, or talk to another,

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maybe their own boss, you know, or a manager. Right. So a great thing about a formalized Q and a, especially with questions asked up front is it allows everyone to prepare and therefore to have more thoughtful engagements. And that sounds like it's really supportive of people who may be more shy or more hesitant to put their words into, I'm super eloquent with words, as you can tell right now, but like someone else who might just not feel like they could just say exactly what they need right on the spot. It or somebody who just like doesn't necessarily always speak up. It allows them to also have a voice, which I love. Exactly. Different interaction styles and different different processing styles. Right. Yeah, exactly. Processing styles. I think like we could talk about that for a whole episode. But just to make sure we get in your last amazing idea,(...) busy seasons. And those can be really stressful for support teams where at the end of, of a sprint in the Q, essentially, you kind of go, okay, what just happened? How do you run that? Yeah. So of course, I must say my brain as a BizOps person, it's always busy season. Like my brain is already thinking to the next busy season while I'm in the busy season, right? Creating that list of all, here's all the things I should not forget about.

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Yeah. Right. But, um, you know, I think that too often for one, a lot of teams only think about busy seasons in terms of staffing, we often don't think about what are all the things that we can do to make that busy season better, whether it be through process or even best, in my opinion, as a BizOps person, eliminating those tickets entirely, right? So what we do is we do, uh, multiple postmortems. So we have each sub team. So each manager directly with our individual contributors and the people that they manage, they do an individual postmortem that focuses on anything and everything. It could be how we work together. How is the work-life balance? Did you have the resources? Did you need, were there any product areas that really just blew up on us, right? Or things that we need to address from that perspective. Anything is fair game. And it's all about just getting as many sticky notes on that virtual or in-person whiteboard as possible.

(...)

Then we synthesize those teams as a full support team. So we'll bring it across sub teams. Where are the themes? Where are the things that just sub team C needs some help versus, Hey, sub team A is really great at that. They didn't feel that right. So we try to build our insights as a full team and we try to do that as quickly as possible. So if you are even close to being at the bottom of that peak, immediately, that's when we want to hold those postmortems when that pain is still acute and you have all these insights still top of mind. That's got to be hard to really just like, we're tired, but we're going to push through and do this. It's so hard, especially with vacations, because we're basically throwing vacations at people then, right? We're like, you finally have the time for you to take some rest, go take a week off. We don't want to hear from you. We'll see you soon. Right. So scheduling is always a little tricky with that, but what's great for us is that doing it that soon allows us to have typically around nine months to then project plan and come up with how are we going to tackle all the things that we want to improve for our people, for our process, for our customers in order to have a smoother season next year. And for us,(...) it means less overtime every year. It means less tickets year over year, even though the company keeps growing. And so really being thoughtful about having a postmortem or multiple after every B's busy season will not only make next season better, but it's going to build some of those growth opportunities that we talked about earlier. Right. Because you're going to have some more projects than you can possibly tackle in a single year, but you're going to have plenty of people that want to tackle those things and take those opportunities to take their career and the professional growth to the next level.(...) And you probably gained this data year after year. So you can see if something didn't didn't really make it to a full project and didn't get tackled for maybe two or three years in a row that gives it a different level of importance if it still persists. Absolutely. Because, you know,(...) having a goal, for example, of less tickets next year is way too generic, right? You can't possibly tackle that. But can you say for these three topics, we are going to try everything that we can do through customer education, through product improvements, through process improvements to lower those?

(...)

Yeah, that I can do that. I can track that. I can monitor the success of. So as long as you have focused, clear goals that are attainable, then it's really meaningful. And guess what? It's really great for your team members at their end of your reviews when they're ready for that promotion. They have data other than support tickets to show how they're having great impact at your company.(...) That is fantastic. This is going to be such a boon for our audience. I can't wait for them to hear it. Thank you so much for being here. I know you need to hop off, but just I could just talk to you all day. You're a delightful human being. It's been so much fun. Love getting the chat with your smiling face. Oh, thank you. You too.