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CS Ops — Collecting and Prioritizing next actions

In a team of 15, everyone has ideas or top priority difficulties that must be solved.
Plus, your Manager trusts you to have a 360º prespective of the Company's broad strategy and develop your work aligned with them.

This means that it’s easy to become overwhelmed with requests if you don’t build a system to collect and prioritize them.

Following my objective of sharing my Journey as a CS Ops, I’ll start by explaining how I’m organizing myself and aligning with team and Company needs simultaneously.

In this story, I’ll give a glimpse at how I’m collecting, recording, and prioritizing Cs Ops work.

Collecting requests

I first felt the need for a framework to collect, record, and prioritize all the requests I was receiving.

I have 2 main ways to collect requests from my colleagues.

1. One-on-One meetings

Once per quarter, I have a 30m call with every team member. We do a small exercise of discovering cumbersome processes or KPIs that they’re struggling to achieve during the call.
I’m still in a learning process, but so far, I’ve developed this small agenda to help us during the call:

Let’s talk about:
What processes would you like to see improved?
Things that you wish to see or do on our tools but you can’t (Planhat, Hubspot);
Any other subjects related to CS team operations;
To unlock ideas:
How are your KPI’s?
What can we do to help you improve them?
What processes/actions take you more time to complete?

After the meeting, I review the information and:

1. if it’s a new request, I open a new card in my Features Pipeline, under the Incoming/Gathering interest phase;
2. if it’s a repeated one, I add the new information to the existing card.

I like to think about these meetings as my QBR’s with my internal Customers.

2. Old and simple direct messages 😛

Like a CSM, I want my customers to trust me and reach me as they wish whenever they feel the need to. No friction, no obstacles.

Hence, I encourage my team to drop me messages on our internal chat, call me when they need to, or invite me for a coffee to discuss something. I take every chance to brainstorm and discover new objectives.

Fortunately, so far, all requests received are aligned or indirectly contributed to the Companie strategy.

No, it’s not pure luck, it’s because we’re using OKR’s and this reporting methodology leads everyone to prioritize their actions and needs to fulfill predefined key results.

Recording requests

I’m using #notion to record every request or idea in a card.

Every card is like a product feature to me that must be evaluated and prioritized.
I took this idea from a podcast episode I heard a while ago, where the subject was CS Ops, and I love it (sorry, I forgot the name of the podcast).

This is my template for a new feature 👇

1. Status; stage in the pipeline;
2. Priority; Low, Medium, or High, given after team voting through surveying;
3. Key result impacted; Connection with our OKR’s;
4. tag’s; some tags for easier search;
5. Date Completed;
6. Upvoted by; people who voted on the feature;
7. Requested by; teammates who originally asked for this feature;
8. Upvotes; Final score after team surveying;
9. Owner; CS Ops responsible for the feature.

The cards then move through the pipeline, following these 5 stages:

• Incoming /Gathering interest = new features not yet prioritized;
• To Do = features already prioritized;
• Doing = features current underwork;
• Ready for release notice = executed features not yet shared or communicated;
• Done = features already communicated/shared among my team and company.

Here's how my features pipeline looks like 👇

Prioritizing requests

Quarterly surveys

At the beginning of every quarter, I send a survey to every teammate, allowing them to vote on the requests they believe are the most or less important.
Note that I don’t vote.

In every survey I include every card under the Incoming /Gathering interest and To Do stages, allowing my teammates to vote on new features and redefine priorities for existing ones.

Here’s an example of the survey 👇

I firmly believe that this turns the process inclusive, democratic, and transparent.

After collecting the answers and using spreadsheets formulas, I ended with a top-down list of the most important features.

Here’s a sneak peek of the spreadsheet and the formula I’m using to calculate the priorities 👇

=ArrayFormula(SUM(IFNA(vlookup(D2:D16,$A$2:$B$5,2,0))))

To finalize the process, I update the cards with the number of upvotes and respective priority 👇

Keep in mind that, although surveying is my primary way to prioritize the features, I still have a few “critical” requests coming throughout the quarter that are prioritized between the Head of CS and me, without team voting…

Let’s be flexible as long as we provide the necessary transparency, meaning that when this happens, I always communicate it to my team.

As you can see, I am just using widespread methodologies.

I hope this overview helps you somehow and If so, don´t be shy, send any feedback you have 😚