This past week I spoke at the Operations Nations annual conference. My session was early in the day, and so I used to opportunity to set the stage for where are we at in the world today and what the challenge I see coming up is for the next 5-10 years. The rest of the day, whether speakers listened and wanted to reiterate, or they did so by their own accord, we heard the same words, spoken again and again. Key word of the day: resilience.
Let me bring you up to speed.
The dot.com boom saw a surge in internet-based companies and a widespread optimism about the potential of the internet. Even after its bubble burst, the foundations were laid for the digital age.
Globalization: The internet connected the world like never before, making international collaboration and market expansion easier and more necessary.
Digital Transformation: As the potential of the internet and digital technologies began to be realized, businesses started digitising their operations.
Agile and Lean Methodologies: The fast-paced world of internet startups popularised these methodologies, facilitating rapid iteration on product. Some of the winners are tools we still use to this day, like Excel, or Atlassian’s products.
Digital allowed us to do business like never before.
The financial crisis brought a wave of skepticism towards established institutions and business models. It made organizations re-evaluate their operating models and strategies.
Innovative Business Models: As the market became more volatile, some businesses realised the opportunity to challenge incumbents and grow. Remember Uber, Airbnb?
Transparent Management: A shift towards more transparent change management emerged, further digitising relationships.
Collaborative tools: digital tools evolved allowing for more structured team collaboration, in real time and faster. Some of the winners are the collaborative Miro and Asana.
In this crunch time, we had to do more with less.
The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped nearly every facet of business and daily life, tested, and in its aftermath continuing to test, our institutions, businesses and ourselves.
Adaptable Operations: in a world where rapid response to changing circumstances was necessary, we put more emphasis on flexibility and adaptability of supply chains and operations.
Continuous Learning & Development: The rapid changes we saw the importance of the need for continuous learning about the markets we operate in. And put more emphasis on us as employees in upskilling.
VUCA Environment: The volatile and unpredictable nature of the world in the last few years is not over…
We need to build companies that are resilient so we can do this for longer.
10 years from now, if we want our company logos down there on that slide, we need to overcome this challenge:
We need to Do more with less for longer.
As I have discussed previously, BizOps is an engine for growth. In conditions of zero interest rates, where growth areas could have a dedicated (member of a) team, hiring for BizOps was ahead of company needs. We knew we are expanding the Sales team? We hired Sales Enablement with that push. We knew we are expanding across geos and ICPs? We hired Deal desk / Legal Ops person.
Obviously the tables have turned, and now we have to wait until it is clear we need a FTE to join and take over something we already do. So while all of these specialties are needed to be done across the company, we might have only a handful of team members doing all this work.
But..
… we got AI to help. And I say good news, because AI is eating up little things the different BizOps specialists do. From the bottom up. Let’s see some examples.
Three tools to help your Biz Ops team:
ChatGPT: Advanced Data Analysis
You can prompt for data analysis. I ran a couple of old example of data from my MBA days, and while it gives the basic insights, it still lacks in more original insights. So if you are looking for something quick - it helps. But if you want the 5% that will really unlock insight, you gotta run that regression yourself. Moreover, if you have an individual Pro acorn for ChatGPT remember to not put any company data in the tool as you forfeit any privacy to the data. Your General Counsel might get antsy with you.
Supermind Ideator: strategy soundboard
You can prompt a business problem and get to a MECE problem tree. From there you can get inputs for ideas of Solutions. You have keep prompting if you want to dig into the details of the problem or the solutions. For example, if you ask how to improve your conversion rates for a product, you will get ideas from pricing, to privacy, community engagement, or doing a competitive analysis. You can prompt each of those about what you can improve on. Good as a sounding board when your team members are stuck in other projects. But not a panacea.
Zapier Canvas: workflow chat tool
Because it is ops after all, and as a flowchart nerd I have to nerd out on this, but the promise of Zapier’s Canvas tool is powerful. Full disclosure, I am yet to use it (we don't use Zapier but if anyone is willing to do a warm intro, hit me up). The demos I saw are exactly what any company needs to connect the dots between product, and ops. You can use it as a basic flowchart diagramming tool to document processes and — for the components that are already connected — it becomes the interface to edit those processes. More importantly, it shows the rest of the components that are part of the big picture.
I am highly optimistic about the effects AI has on BizOps teams. Ai eating up little specialised things means, leaving professionals to focus on the interconnected, interdependent, and therefore more strategic points.
What I think this means for senior BizOps leaders is, you can hire once you know precisely what you are missing on a team, and shifting your attention to that would have a high cognitive cost. Generalists would be able to gain short term relief to specialised needs. What it means for more junior members of BizOps is now you can learn so much faster! Specialists will be able to build generalist skills easier.
As always, to continue the conversation, connect with me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vessclewley/
Also, we are hiring! If you have experience working in RevOps, or a function which taught you about Salesforce, Tableu, PowerBI and similar tools, drop you CV. The good thing is, you get work on some super cool BizOps projects. The not so good things is, you get to put up with me ;)