Defining the Mission + Scope of Your Ops Team
How you get clarity on what winning looks like.
What’s the purpose of your ops team?
Why does it exist at all?
This may seem totally obvious. But often, it’s not.
Just like “lead” or “campaign” or “MQL,” different people may have completely different definitions and expectations. Even your own definition may not be precise.
Why mission and scope clarity is important
It enables clear decision-making
We make a never-ending series of prioritization decisions at work.
If you aren’t clear on your mission, you can easily focus on the wrong things.
This creates potential for a troubling scenario where you’re working hard - maybe even focused on the right problem - but not actually delivering what the business needs most.
Practical example:
Your company is struggling to close new business, so your ops team launches a project to tackle some technical and process inefficiencies that sales has been complaining about.
What you don’t realize is that most AEs aren’t clear on your positioning and aren’t delivering a consistent pitch.
The company relies on you to enable the sales team to succeed, but you thought of your mission only in terms of tech and process.
You limited the scope of inquiry and missed the root cause.
It aligns expectations
Businesses are networks of collaboration. Collaboration works well when participants have (more or less) shared expectations.
It tends to break down when expectations aren’t aligned.
Like it or not, our success at work is a combination of delivering impact AND the perceptions that others have of us.
Depending on impact and perception, you fall into one of the following categories.
Imposter: You deliver no impact but people think highly of you. Some people are surprisingly good at this, but it’s obviously not the road we want to take.
Unsung hero: You deliver great impact but it’s not aligned with stakeholder expectations. Bad for job security.
Winning: You deliver great impact, and everyone recognizes it. You want to be here.
A clear mission for your ops team creates alignment on how you will deliver impact for the business.
Practical example:
Part of your scope is to enable marketers to be autonomous in executing emails, webinars, and other marketing initiatives.
You deliver a great decentralized system with tools, enablement, documentation, and templates to make this easy. Impact is high.
But, some team members just want you to send the emails for them. They expect this to be part of your scope. When you don't deliver it, they have a negative perception of your impact and complain to your boss.
You have a misalignment of expectations. You're an unsung hero.
How to create the team mission and scope
Ideally, try to keep it simple and not overcomplicate things.
Building the definition
This may simply be a matter of transcribing tribal knowledge that is already largely recognized into a written format.
But in a larger company, or where expectations are currently seriously mis-aligned, the process may be more difficult.
I believe it’s always best for ops leaders to propose their own definition and solicit feedback vs. wait for one to be handed down.
Note, I’m not suggesting there’s a single universal definition for what your mission/scope should be. It’s always company-specific and needs to complement the scope of other teams.
Format
Mine is a single slide. It includes:
A single mission statement that summarizes our team’s role in the business.
Three pillars that capture our scope - the ways in which we deliver that impact.
In my company, the role of ops is broad and performance-oriented. Our efforts need to be aligned with the success of our teams. So I wrote the mission to reflect this performance-orientation.
Alignment
It’s obviously not enough to just write it down - you need other teams to agree and validate your mission and scope.
This again may be relatively simple or very complex depending on your organization.
At minimum, I would solicit input from your GTM leadership, direct manager, and operations leadership as applicable.
You also need to socialize this with the revenue teams you support so that THEY are crystal clear on what you do and how you’ll partner to gether.
Practical example:
When I started at my current company, I was building the team from scratch.
I wrote the mission and scope with relative autonomy, validated it with my boss (the marketing leader) and then presented it to the marketing team along with my first roadmap.
I now include it continually in other documents, including the onboarding presentation that all new hires go through.
If I was working at a 10,000 person company, the process would likely be quite different.
Resources
I highly recommend RevOps FM episode #7, Habits of a Highly Effective COO, for one of the clearest definitions of the role of ops that I’ve heard.
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