Principle 04
Treat operations as products.
Internal systems deserve owners, users, research, roadmaps, and success metrics. Most get a spreadsheet and a hope.
An operations function is a product whose users happen to be employees. It has a value proposition, an adoption curve, a support burden, and a quality bar. When it is run as overhead, it decays. When it is run as a product, it compounds.
Internal friction is the most under-measured cost in most organizations. It never appears on a dashboard, so it never gets funded, so it grows. Giving operations a product structure is what makes that cost visible enough to fix.
- 01Name an owner for every internal workflow, with the authority to change it.
- 02Do user research internally: interview the people doing the work, watch them work.
- 03Define success in cycle time, quality, cost, and risk, and publish the numbers.
- 04Give internal tools documentation, onboarding, and an adoption plan. They are products.
The product operating model at Apptegy was itself a product: versioned, researched with its users, and rebuilt roughly every time the company doubled. That is why it outlasted my tenure.
Scaling Apptegy from 800 to 4,000 CustomersNext principle
Design for systems that get stronger over time.Contact
Let's get into it.
Ambiguous problem, AI adoption that stalled, an operating model that stopped scaling, a support function that should be a product. That is the conversation I want.