Weekend newsletter #12
The best of what I've read this week, about operations, training and education, communication, and more
Hello!
I am starting to feel more settled in my new apartment and am slowly getting back to my regular projects and activities, along with a new opportunity I may write about next week.
If you’re in the U.S., I hope you have finished your tax return, or have an extension, or an automatic extension due to extreme weather in California! I completed a first draft of taxes and I have an appointment this week with the tax accountant I used for my previous business — she also left her previous firm to start her own business recently! Support your local small businesses!
Onto the resources!
What I've been reading, watching, and listening to:
Rosalyn Santa Elena breaks down some pros and cons of choosing a high-growth startup or larger established organization when you’re looking for a new job or new career path.
Sara McNamara gives great advice to help operations people avoid getting stuck in triage mode from all the incoming requests from other departments.
I saw a few posts about differentiating software onboarding and software implementation, here’s Adam Sharrow’s take on it.
Mark Kilens discusses a People-First GTM model. If you have the same question I did about including partners as people, scroll down to the comments!
Jordan Henderson wants you to make sure you are enabling enablement!
Yamini Rangan shares about the career growth she has experienced by optimizing for Customer > Company > Team > Self.
Rebecca Nash talks about the importance of having a maintenance & monitoring plan for the systems/processes/documentation your company puts into place. These are not set-it-and-forget-it items!
Lindsay Warren shared an article and thoughts about work-from-home productivity.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher gives insight into when managing up is not enough or not possible.
Gagan Biyani shared a carousel about the underdog story of Udemy, his previous company, which almost failed 5 times.
Kathleen Booth discusses the importance of encouraging all team members and leadership to develop a personal brand.
Sarah Medilo writes about deciding when to adopt a new solution, such as when to stop relying on my nemesis, spreadsheets.
Grayson Faircloth shared about the contest the Master the Flywheel course is doing to win an INBOUND ticket and travel expenses.
Dan Tyre shares a guide for job interviews, geared toward salespeople but valuable for all.
Ashley Lewin describes her structure for doing data analysis.
Scot Chisholm writes about decluttering your business.
Margot Mazur shares a partner evaluation template.
Dharmesh Shah writes about some of my favorite topics of being specific, avoiding vague language, and writing as an essential business skill for all roles.
Darrell Alfonso advises how to be more effective in ops
Alice Lemée where to find interesting things online for writing newsletters
Articles, Reports, Guides, Newsletters
Adam Grant’s New York Times article “Your Email Does Not Constitute My Emergency” was shared by several awesome people in my network and really hits home for operations people or anyone who receives tasks or requests from other people at work through their email. (Email is not the best way to receive work requests…but that is a different article!)
Fast Company’s 5 Ways to be a Manager that People Don’t Want to Quit reminds us that, “Your manager is how you see the company and how you navigate your relationship with the company.” The “ways” in the title include: Give context, be proactive, be empathetic, help grow, and value input.
Molly Graham’s Lessons newsletter talks about planning your calendar as a leader, including a spreadsheet template. Note that like anything, it’s less about copying someone else’s system and more about HAVING a system in the first place.
MarketingProfs writes about how to beat the average CMO tenure of 40 months, compared to average CEO tenure of 85 months. The article’s division of information between the stage/size of the company is helpful.
Fast Company’s HR often sucks. Here’s how it could be better discusses the balance of representing the company and advocating on behalf of employees, the struggle with any department if the CEO doesn’t believe in the function, embracing both internal and external transparency (which I am a huge advocate of), and the idea HR should focus on big strategic work and only brought into individual personnel issues for serious incidents...I see lots of similarities with RevOps!
Harvard Business Review ($) says that companies need to normalize healthy turnover, which is something I haven’t seen written much about lately. Making Planned Attrition a Normal Process: Acknowledge that this isn’t forever from the beginning, focus on promoting internal candidates and boomerang employees, and engage your alumni.
Jeff Ignacio’s RevOps Impact Newsletter talks about processes and cadences to manage renewals, best practices for customer success ops, the often-forgotten part of RevOps! It is a common mystery at new or growing companies — which department owns renewals? You really need a defined process that everyone is aware of and Jeff gives advice on the best practices.
CFO Secrets reveals the 5 questions that solved a $50m problem … and how to deal with an angry CEO
SparkToro’s latest blog sounds like ”make it high quality” and “10x” are the new popular “make it pop” vague requests for creative work. Great points about how to tie content to business goals.
Scott D. Clary’s newsletter discusses how to improve your workspace
Similarly, Harvard Business Review ($) writes about How Your Physical Surroundings Shape Your Work Life
The Cut’s “Could I Still Be Ambitious Without my OCD” explores the intersections of career and mental health, a topic that always intrigues me.
Joy Cho’s newsletter compares the difference between therapy and life coaching
Curious Peoples newsletter dives into the history of Occam’s Razor, where the simplest explanation is most likely.
John Cutler’s The Beautiful Mess newsletter talks about finding the root cause of the problem, the problem behind the problem, the cause not the symptoms, and how finding the cause can be a negotiation.
Association for Talent Development (ATD)’s The Importance of Curb-Cuts in Learning talks about accessibility in learning similar to the curb cut ramps on sidewalks, including closed captions, text-to-speech, mind mapping, and flexible scheduling to remove barriers to learning.
Generalist World explains the Straight Line Fallacy and why having a Generalist at the helm sets you up for success. “The ‘best’ path is not always the most obvious or practical at surface level… Generalists observe and decode the multiple complex factors that can affect a situation.”
Non-work
I have really been enjoying author Abby Jimenez’s Tiktoks about her dogs, especially Stuntman Mike. Tess’s ‘kidnapping’ story is also funny!
Podcasts & Webinars
Melissa McCready and Mike Rizzo had a great webinar about considering a career in RevOps on MarketingOps.com
Opsy’s latest podcast interviewed Vanesa Cotlar, Vp of People and Culture. She mentioned how time-consuming it is to build content for a manager training program, and partnering with Elevate Leadership Academy for help.
Drift’s GTM Lab’s event recording for Process makes perfect: Using clear intentions to drive operational success had a LOT of great advice about documentation, especially around 20-27 minutes in, and creating a danger dash to monitor what might be going wrong before it gets into the danger zone!
HubHeroes had a great podcast about customer delight with Christina Garnett, an amazing and delightful human who manages HubSpot offline community and advocacy. Spoiler alert: Everyone is responsible for customer delight!
Featured Events or Classes:
April 18: HubSpot Admins: Quick Win Email Tips for Q2 – Everything is always changing!
April 20: WizOps War Stories (WoWS): Oh Sh*! Moments From Ops Leaders & How to Avoid Them
April 20: Energy, Time, and Task Management - Startup Lunch & Learn Series
Operations Nation is offering the second cohort of their Aspriring COO course, now virtual!
Pavilion’s course for Creating & Implementing a Sales Playbook that Sticks is now available on demand for Pavilion members.
Frank Cowell is offering a workshop for agency owners
Featured Book:
I haven’t read any books worth sharing in the past week but I have been watching too much TV! Including The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s final season, Sandition and Marie Antoinette on PBS, and The Woman King
Featured Tip:
Did you know Amazon has a refurbished store with a 90-day guarantee? I ordered a vacuum through here, for this first apartment with carpet since I was in college ... though UPS couldn’t find my address lol, I think that was a delivery driver problem, not a store problem :)
This Linkedin Carousel builder looks interesting! I’ve been using PDF carousels a little on my HubSpot user group summary posts, just googling “image to pdf” choosing whatever link, and loading my screenshots of slides into it. This tool looks useful for skipping the screenshot step if you have Tweets or other content to show.
Featured Job:
The platform where I host my documentation cohort course, Maven, has a few interesting roles including community growth and product marketing.
Self-Promotion of the Week:
One-day documentation writing workshop, THIS THURSDAY, April 20, 9AM-11:30AM Pacific time.
I would love for smaller businesses, including one-person businesses, to join this session to help me tailor a future version of the workshop!
If you enroll in a workshop and then decide to take the full course, I will discount the workshop cost from the full course cost.
The next HubSpot RevOps bootcamp I created and co-teach starts in a few weeks! This 6-week live course is free for HubSpot customers and partners.
Thanks for reading! Please comment below with anything you'd like to see from these weekly newsletters.