Operations isn’t even a real job... Confessions of an Operations Executive
Yes, I have a chip on my shoulder.
Welcome to my professional midlife crisis
For those who are new here or haven’t read our About Us page, a little history for you. Craig and I initially started talking because I wanted to better understand the role of Ops vs. Product in healthcare and health tech. This exploration stemmed from a concern that the responsibilities that had fallen into my purview early in my career were being kind of usurped by Product as the Product role became increasingly prevalent in health tech companies.
Through the Care Collaborative, I’ve now had the opportunity to chat with a ton of people across a variety of teams in health tech. What I have come to learn is that … it’s worse than I thought. No one even knows what operations does.
Now, I’m a nerd (and highly competitive). I’ve read tons of books and articles about the role of the COO and operational leaders in an effort to better myself, grow in my role, and understand how to explain what I do to my kids.
Consistently the takeaway from these books is that operations has a broad span and can’t be defined by the role and instead has to be defined by the organization and/or the COO’s relationship to the CEO.
Essentially, operations is a role of exclusion, not inclusion. There isn’t a standard set of operations responsibilities; instead, operations takes on the roles / departments / tasks that no one else wants to do. It’s low glory, high glue.
Ops gets a bad rap
I initially made the decision to move my career path into operations after spending time in communications and consulting. I wanted to be the person making the decisions instead of the person talking about the decisions or telling other people what decisions to make. In my first hybrid operational-strategic role, I felt that I couldn’t be good at the job of being a consultant or a senior leader in healthcare if I had never experienced the minutiae and day to day decision making of actually running a piece of the operation. [NB: This is obviously not entirely true; plenty of very successful consultants haven’t sat within an operation. This was a personal paranoia.]
However, as I took on more specifically operational roles, I began to feel the weight of judgment from peers and potential employers.
Clinical leaders often have a lot of skepticism about operations because they view them as “administrators” who add busy work to clinicians’ plates that doesn’t benefit them.
Product leaders feel that workflow and experience efforts should live under Product and Design because they’re uniquely positioned to do user research and create thoughtful and innovative solutions.
I’ve heard in compensation discussions that operations professionals *naturally* make less than Product leaders because that’s what the market bears.
At the same time, I have heard Product leaders bemoaning the fact that clinical leaders aren’t suited to lead implementation of new product and service initiatives.
I have Clinical leaders complaining that Product and Design don’t truly understand the ins-and-outs of delivering care to humans and undervalue the clinician experience in favor of the patient experience.
So where does that leave operations? In my experience, operations professionals are viewed as the grunts who take orders and get sh*t done – and are sticks in the mud. They say no all the time and just want everything done NOW. They’re excluded from strategic conversations because they can’t help but talk about why things aren’t feasible. They’re not innovative and can’t see the forest for the trees. (And on and on. You’ve heard it - or thought it - before.)
In contrast, I think these things have a lot of cause and effect. My personal experience has shown me that more conventionally “strategic” teams ideate and then tell operations teams what is going to happen without including them in the conversation. When that happens, it’s inevitable that operations will feel defensive, push back, and identify the gaps in the strategy, because no one has appropriately gauged the feasibility of the service that’s been conceived of.
What ops actually does
In every operations role I’ve had I have had to elbow my way into a seat at the table. With Sales and Implementation teams who promise things that they aren’t responsible for delivering. With Marketing teams who introduce new initiatives without informing the people who will be interacting with customers every day. With Product teams who create beautiful ideas that don’t take into consideration the way the service has to interface with the technology on the “back end” by clinicians or support teams.
I’d argue that operations is the glue, the intersection of the three circles in our (soon to be famous) Venn diagram of building in health tech. In other words, when we talk about processes and companies being held together with scotch tape and toothpicks and marshmallows - ops teams are the scotch tape and toothpicks and marshmallows. We’re not doing it this way because we think it’s the best way necessarily; we’re doing it this way because someone’s got to do it.
Engineering:Tech Infrastructure::Operations:Human Infrastructure
(How do you like them SAT analogies?)
I propose that we start thinking about operations the same way we think about Engineering teams.
A tech product would never be conceptualized, built, or iterated upon without input from the engineering team that has to build it. One might stipulate that this is a false equivalence because Engineering teams have unique skills that other teams can’t replicate. I would argue that operations professionals do as well. We may not have learned our skills in school or in a bootcamp, but I posit that my 20 years of operational experience has afforded me an understanding of human behavior, workflow management, metrics review, and - frankly - people management that Product, Clinical, Marketing, and Sales teams can’t replicate. It’s time to give the operations teams their due.
I’m not defending those times when ops is unreasonably grouchy about innovation or new ways of doing things. (Though I do think this pushback is largely driven by fear, lack of trust, and a little bit of “I’m going to have to clean it up if this doesn’t work” PTSD.) Everyone needs to be mindful of how the pieces intersect. But that goes both ways. Just as you want ops to reasonably respond to your new feature proposals, you can’t just assume “oh, ops will handle it” when you have a gap in your plan. Let them weigh in on how that gap looks to them so that the hole you’re leaving is a shape ops can fill without a leaky bucket.
Buy me a coffee and tell me I’m pretty
Ops is the job that you don’t really notice until it’s not there. Take a moment to think about all those little things you ‘don’t have time for’ but need to happen and somehow get done. That’s us. We’re doing the work you don’t see and scrappily innovating with toothpicks and marshmallows before the “real” innovation teams innovate so the company can keep the wheels on until you’re able to get to the backlog project you promised us a year ago.
Show your local ops professional a little love today. (Some ideas: invite them to your ideation meetings, listen to them, acknowledge the value they bring, or just buy them a coffee.)
End rant. Ops out.
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It's interesting that you capitalized Engineering, Product, Clinical, Marketing, and Sales but not operations.