14 Feb, 2023
• RevOps
Written by McAlign
RevOps is a movement within the retail industry focused on creating a culture of continuous improvement. It's an approach that emphasizes regular and ongoing check-ins with teams to identify problem areas and solve them before they become issues.
It is imperative that you set goals before starting a solution. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment and start looking at what other people are doing, but it’s important to define the problem first.
When setting your team's goals, make sure that they are:
Ambitious but realistic. If you want to lose weight, go for something that is achievable within 3-6 months of regular exercise and healthy eating habits (more on this further down). This will help keep your motivation high and ensure that you don't give up too quickly if things don't work out right away. If you can't see yourself actually achieving the goal within a few months, then maybe it's not quite ambitious enough yet!
Clearly everyone knows exactly what success looks like when we achieve it together as a team during our monthly check-ins (this goes back again to point 1: defining the problem first).
The frequency of check-ins depends on the size of your team, the complexity of your project, and other factors specific to your organization. As a general rule, we recommend checking in with individual contributors at least once per week and with teams on a biweekly or monthly basis.
If you have a large team working on an ambitious project that has multiple milestones over a long timeline (e.g., three months), then it can be helpful to meet every two weeks as well. In these cases, having regular meetings will help keep everyone aligned and ensure that everyone is focused on achieving their goals—even if they're spread across different departments or locations.
With a RevOps implementation, you may have considered check-ins as simply a reason to stop work and get coffee. But by taking time to think about the format of your check-ins, you can make them more productive and effective.
Make sure that the format matches the purpose of your check-in. You may want to use different formats for different purposes:
Meetings where you discuss progress or plans for improvement (quarterly). This is usually done in person or over video chat and lasts about 30 minutes per session.
Weekly stand ups (daily) - These are short meetings where everyone stands up so that no one dominates the conversation. They last 3–5 minutes each week so that you can run through tasks quickly and efficiently.
In order to maximize the impact of your regular team check-ins, you should establish a consistent agenda. At the very least, this means that you should share your agenda in advance with each member of your team and make sure that it is clear and concise. It is also important for an agenda to be flexible so that it can be adapted to meet the needs of members who are unable to attend meetings from time to time.
After every meeting, review whether or not you achieved all of your objectives by checking off items on the agenda and making notes about any action items or new topics that need discussion at future meetings.
Team members should be encouraged to participate in the process by talking about their experiences, how they work, and what they think would be helpful.
If you're leading the meeting, make sure that everyone is given an opportunity to speak. If you've got a lot of people on the call, it might help if you had one person from each department on each call (so three calls total). This way there's less chance that someone will feel like their voice isn't being heard or their opinion isn't valued by the team.
Ideally, these calls take place once a week so that all participants have time to digest what was discussed and decide whether or not they want to share their feedback with other colleagues as well (or just wait until next time!).
The goal here should be transparency: no matter who's on these calls or what topic came up last week's call, everything should be recorded so that anyone can access any part of it at any time after the fact - whether or not they were present during said discussion or decision making process!
Following up on action items is crucial to the success of a RevOps initiative. While curtailing some of the tasks you're used to doing in your daily work will lead to a more focused and efficient team, it can also create space for other tasks that will help you improve your process overall.
Follow-ups should be scheduled at least once a week, though two or three times is ideal. The goal isn't just to check on progress; it's also about ensuring that everyone has an understanding of what needs to happen next. Make sure that all relevant parties are present at these meetings (so if one person from QA didn't attend the last meeting, they should be invited). And make sure no one leaves thinking they'll remember what was discussed—always send out notes after each meeting.
Be sure not to wait too long between follow-ups—ideally they should come within one week of each other so people don’t forget about them altogether! But when scheduling them too frequently risks making them feel repetitive and unnecessary (which leads back to our old friend: context switching).
Review the meeting agenda.
Review the meeting minutes, including any action items and next steps that were not completed during the meeting.
Discuss any new action items that came up during this week’s review of your team’s RevOps status and plans for next steps, including any changes from last week’s review or other new insights into improving your revolved software products through regular team check-ins (and possibly some additional training).
Discuss any action items from previous weeks that were not completed as planned due to prioritization changes or other reasons (and note these as “to do” items on a shared project management system like Trello).
RevOps is a series of short, structured check-ins. The goal is to set clear goals and objectives and to track progress against those goals. By using this strategy, you can drive deeper insights into your business, make better decisions about how to improve it and increase revenue.
Because RevOps are so effective, many companies want to do them as often as possible. But having frequent meetings isn't always a good thing; if you don't plan them well or do them right, they can be a waste of time rather than an opportunity for your team members' growth.
To ensure that your RevOps meetings are productive:
Set clear goals and objectives
Plan your meetings carefully and stick to the agenda
Use a variety of tools and techniques- brainstorming and problem solving.
The most important thing is to make sure that you are having the right kind of meeting. Don't just have a meeting because you think it's something people expect from you or because it seems like the easiest way to get things done. You should be looking for ways to optimize every aspect of your team's work, and regular check-ins can help do just that.
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