Progress Update on Co-Building
A quick update on how co-building Ops Hacks is progressing!
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I've invited members in the community to build out Ops Hacks together with me.
There has been slow but steady progress on that front.
First, in true ops fashion, we got our own OKRs for the rest of the year (hat tip to Raphael who headed up this initiative). Since we are building in public, I'd like to share them with you all.
Ops Hacks' 2022 OKRs
Objective 1: Maximize value and engagement for existing members
Key Result 1: Maintain average NPS above 50 for all existing members
Key Result 2: Over 80% of members make at least 1 new meaningful connection each quarter
Key Result 3: Over 80% of members remain active at any given time
Objective 2: Recruit, onboard and retain a diverse community of early stage ops professionals
Key Result 1: 25 new members by the end of Q2, 50 new members by the end of Q3, 100 new members by the end of Q4
Key Result 2: Maintain a community with 40-60% women (currently 25%)
As you can see, the objectives and key results are fairly high level.
My take on this is that high level OKRs leave room and space for us to iterate and refine our approach, which is crucial at this early stage. Precise and actionable OKRs at this point could lead to optimizing for the wrong things. If this sounds like an excuse, it might be because it is.
Initial projects
Once we aligned on the OKRs within the co-build crew, it was time to start scoping projects that map to them. Instead of running a top-down process, I invited each participating member to scope their own project based on what they felt excited about. This approach was based on advice I got from my friend Jen, who recommended that as a community builder, you should always follow where the members' energy is.
The fact that the community is free and runs on members' contribution makes it easier to make decisions like this. No boss or investors to answer to. Just keep the community energized and engaged. It's great.
Anyway, the initial projects we are starting out with are:
Design and launch a new member onboarding journey
I'm excited about this project because admittedly, I haven't done a great job of onboarding members into the community. I built out a fairly robust process for the application process, but had largely left new members on their own as soon as they joined Slack. This has been resulting in some of our new members feeling lost on day 1 and slowly becoming disengaged.
Raphael and Abhi want to revamp the new member experience to help them become more embedded into the community and I'm excited to see what they come up with.
Set up a masterminds program
This program will aim to create smaller clusters of folks with similarities who can meet on a recurring basis to exchange ideas and help one another.
Laura will be tackling this project, based on her experience of going through On Deck and the lesson learned that smaller groups often help strengthen the connection an individual has to the wider community. And also it's a great way to meet folks who might be in a similar place and learn from them / give help.
Host a roundtable discussion of existing female members
The objective of this work stream is to better understand what existing female members' pain points are, how Ops Hacks can become more inclusive, and how we might be able to recruit more women into the community.
This is something that I hadn't put as much effort into, despite recognizing its importance. My excuse for slacking on this was that I was focused on recruiting initial members - growing a fledgling community, I felt like I didn't have the luxury of handpicking members to ensure diversity.
When I shared this line of thinking with Laura, she said something which made me immediately realize my mistake. She said that ensuring diversity and representation has to start on day 1. The larger the community gets, the more difficult it is to right the ship. That was a great wake-up call to realize that we have to be working on this right now, and I'm happy and grateful to have Laura help on this front.
Set up a member analytics dashboard
Fairuz will create a dynamic dashboard that gives an overview of the members that comprise the community. When we onboard new members, we collect basic information like members' location, their company size, industry, etc. We will be creating a dashboard using this data to give a snapshot of our community.
I hope that this work stream will help us achieve two things:
Refine our member-community fit. By understanding who are existing members are and what types of companies they work at, we can better tailor our marketing and recruiting efforts on those we believe would be a good fit for the community
Going back to the point about diversity, highlight where we are doing well and where we are lagging behind. This will hopefully drive more transparency, and consequently, accountability
Create an Ops Hacks repository of resources and wisdom
There have been many insightful conversations and helpful resources in our Slack channel, that are now buried and difficult to search for and access. Fairuz wants to pull these conversations and resources into Luma so everyone can access them more easily and not have to repeat the same questions that have already been answered. #OpsEfficiency
So there you have it. We have our OKRs and projects. It feels good to have a list of concrete goals to work towards and several projects on the go that will hopefully get us there.
As always, we'll continue to build in public and share progress updates.
If you want to join in building Ops Hacks - apply here.