In the fall or winter of 1999, during one of my English tutoring sessions (Jacek, if you’re reading this - the investment with you at that time was one of the best in my life), I watched “The Matrix”. Among the many iconic scenes, I already liked one back then, and it resonates with me to this day.
Morpheus: Then hit me…if you can.
Morpheus assumes a fighting stance. Neo assumes a similar stance, cautiously circling until he gives a short cry and launches a furious attack. They move at high speed, fists and feet striking from every angle as Neo presses his attack, but each and every blow is blocked by effortless speed. Morpheus punches Neo and knocks him over.
Morpheus: Good. Adaptation… improvisation. But your weakness is not your technique.
Today, I will use it as inspiration to tell you what kind of people we need for an Ops team and how to find them nowadays.
Key Talent Profiles
In classic startup team theories, there is, for example, the 3H model theory. You need a Hustler, a Hacker and a Hipster to cover the complementary skillset of the founders or first employees in the team. Once these competencies were covered, there was hope that the team created in this way would be able to build and scale its product.
What was often overlooked at the time (a sin of many inexperienced investors) was the team’s ability to pivot the project and its level of adaptability to changes (both internal and external).
And how does it look like in the digital transformation of large organizations?
The Hustler
The role of the Hustler is usually played by the change leader or leaders. We are talking about people who can inspire the team (in our case: Ops) as well as the organization and the organizational environment to act.
They are able to manage resistance to digital transformation. They know which rules to keep, which to ignore, which to bend, and which to break - always with the good of the organization (including, above all, the medium and long term) and the product in mind.
In the most uncomfortable situations, this is a group of people who lead the transformation of the organization against it (in terms of habits and procedures) and who make many enemies within the organization.
They are the people who are the fuel for Ops, but whose mental health must be taken care of (and of which they must be reminded), because they most often take on the least pleasant tasks and the least positive feedback.
They are the shield for the Ops team.
The Hacker
The Hacker in Ops is the core and the source of change. We are talking about at least two groups of specialists.
To take an organization to the next level in transformation, not so much to stay ahead of the competition (which can be a challenge in itself) as to “stay ahead of the future”, i.e. to make the organization as change-proof as possible, which in today’s world means… to make it more manoeuvrable and adaptable to change, you need tech-savvy specialists.
You need the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the trouble makers (that was a great speech, no?). You need nerds and geeks who read change logs of the technologies they are specialized in – and to which they are not attached. Above all, digital transformation is based on creating and implementing agnostic solutions, where the first questions to ask are:
- Can we do without it?
- How much time will it cost us?
- How should it be developed (especially in the context of organizational education when scaling Ops activities to other departments) to ensure that the answers to the first two questions remain the same?
If there are people in your team who have this mindset, you are halfway there. If they also question the legitimacy of the technologies they specialize in instead of blindly promoting them and pushing them into every solution, even better. And if they go even further, don’t let them go.
Does the mobile application architect still work with frameworks from several years ago that have even been abandoned by their manufacturers? Or is it perhaps someone who is fixated on native technologies and reacts allergically to any hybrid solutions as non-kosher, regardless of the costs (of development as well as recruitment and retention of developers in at least two teams)?
Or maybe you have someone who understands the current technology stack and has an idea and strategy for its gradual migration in the direction that is most promising? Or maybe you have a mobile application architect with whom you can freely discuss whether mobile applications will exist in a few or several years’ time, and if so, in what form, and how can we prepare for these changes?
The ideal people in the Ops team are able to talk fluently about the first, second and third horizons of change, devising and implementing a strategy for these instead of ad hoc actions, even if this model is promoted in most organizations.
Data Analysts & Scientists are also Hackers in Ops. The larger the organization, the more legacy software and infrastructure it has (sometimes dating back decades). The more of these factors, the greater the chance that the data used by this software is not standardized in any global way (at the level of a country or international organization), compatible between individual systems, complete or even… correct.
Perhaps, as part of the inventory, you will identify processes that contaminate data (incorrect values) or pollute it (inconsistent values, blocking or preventing its transformation or use in all processing processes in the company). You need people who know about this.
Nowadays, it is relatively easy to find data analysts, even at a very high level, but for an Ops team, you need people who, in addition to drawing practical business conclusions, are able to question the quality of the data or… question the very legitimacy of its collection.
And what about the hipster?
In the startup world, they were the people responsible for the market-readiness of the product, even (or especially) when the product was not yet finished. They were the ones responsible for product design, for building and maintaining the brand, for providing a satisfying customer experience that at least validates the idea and the business model, and in the best cases - starts to generate income.
The larger the organization, the greater the chance of isolating a similar role or team, but in reality, nowadays, Ops should also assume that some of these competencies will be taken on by the Hustler, who understands and leads the vision of the transformation of the organization and/or product - because they will put themselves in the customer’s shoes.
The remaining part (which is sometimes the majority) will be taken over by… AI, supervised by the Ops team. User behavior models, their habits, UX patterns are principles that are relatively standardized, and the more mass-produced our product is, the easier it is to generate its interface, substantive reviews, and the final touch of its customer experience - instead of creating it from scratch.
I have tested it in several dozen cases and with the right competences and governance process assurance, it can save almost 80% of time, and the maneuverability in design with AI support is incomparable to anything before.
Recruiting Strategies in the Market of hidden Gems
The people you need are 99% of the time already employed. If you are lucky, they are working for your company. If not, it will take longer to find them than in a standard recruitment process. The second message is that the specialists you need, especially in terms of their mindset, will not be motivated by money.
Don’t get me wrong: this may still mean that such a person is currently earning money that is not satisfying for them, and one of the factors will be a pay rise - but it will not be the dominant factor.
We need people for Ops who we can infect with our mission; we need rebels who we can invite to the revolution - and who will follow this idea of a new job or a new position. We need people to whom we can promise job satisfaction - and to whom we will deliver it. In corporations, it’s super difficult, trust me.
I will not elaborate on AI support in recruitment processes here - there is plenty of it (what is always worth considering are all solutions that build asynchronous recruitment methods), and probably at least a dozen new solutions have been developed while writing this text that I am not even aware of.
I will also not write about employer branding and how important a strong employer brand is, how significant the organizational culture is, how it is communicated externally, and how true it is.
Social Recruiting
What has helped me the most is social recruiting, which is not just about using social media, but also about encouraging your closest professional network to help you find suitable candidates and relying on recommendations.
I hired the best designers based on recommendations - and their portfolios usually did not reflect their talents. I hired the best programmers or “business people” without going through hundreds/thousands of CVs, but rather by meeting for a coffee and having a casual conversation to get to know the other person.
And remember that such meetings do not necessarily mean an immediate decision to hire (by either party), which leads me to another element of recruitment - passive candidates.
Passive Candidates
It is okay to tell yourself that at this stage the candidate does not fit the company, but when the company meets his or her needs in the future (ideally, when this future can be defined in months or quarters), you will get back in touch. It is okay to talk to people who are not directly interested in actively changing jobs, as long as you are not too pushy.
Sometimes it will take you less than a week to hire the right person. In other cases, it may take several years – but those years will be filled with working together to make sure the employee fits your company and your company fits the employee. Both stories are true, by the way.
And above all: hire slowly, fire quickly. It is completely okay if it takes months to fill a position. It is very important that when you see a promising candidate, you speed up the process, because the very next day he or she may no longer be available to you. These changes of pace (especially instead of multi-stage and often pointless recruitment) are important.
It is more important to be able to fire quickly.
The last thing you need is a rock star who can’t work even in a small team and whose ego is through the roof. The last thing you need is a toxic team member (or toxic leader) who poisons not only people’s minds but also the very idea of transformation. Even if you think you have to fire the best specialist in your Ops unit for the reasons mentioned above, do it.
It is part of risk management and minimizing future losses.
Trust over Talent
In one of my favorite lectures, Simon Sinek talks about how the Navy Seals are recruited. He draws a graph with two axes: skills and trust. Of course, no one wants to hire people with low skills and low trust.
Of course, everyone wants to hire people with high skills and high trust. But what about situations that are not so simple? Hire someone with higher skills even though we have difficulty trusting that person (or it turns out after hiring that the team does not trust that employee)?
Navy Seals, Sinek, and I believe in the same thing: trust is the most important factor. Skills can be learned - which is particularly important nowadays, when experience in the latest solutions is gained in battle and the ability to improvise and adapt to change (remember the words of Morpheus?) are more important than, for example, knowledge of a particular programming language or completion of a particular course.
You’ll be creating the products and processes that don’t exist yet and you’re organization will be frightened as hell when it’ll see what you’re been doing.
Trust must also be built within the organizational structure, and this is even more difficult because it requires systemic changes. Transparent communication and openness to mistakes as the foundations of effective teamwork build a culture of trust. Allowing experimentation and learning from mistakes creates an atmosphere of psychological safety and emotional engagement.
Trust can be measured. Even in transformational teams, I recommend introducing Trust Metrics to measure the level of trust within the team.
What I wish for you is to work in teams and organizations where you can trust blindly. Where you know where the transformation is going and if you kick the metaphorical ball to the left or right without even looking in that direction, a team member will be there to catch it. It is in this atmosphere, without excessive and pointless control, that change is implemented the fastest.