Alex Armstead When you start getting to that six or seven year mark, people need something that allows them to really stretch themselves and think creatively, and not be so prescriptive about what you're asking them to do.
People can only tackle nebulous projects if they know that they can fail, or not succeed. That's different than a compensation goal — something that you might be literally tied to, the dollars that come into your checking account — versus what are things that, regardless if the metric follows, the inputs were absolutely right and necessary and good for us long term.
We often have a framework that we use at Clever, where we try to think about every decision or thing that we do through the lens of: is it good for the customer, is it good for the business, is it good for the team? And if you can say yes to all three of those, guess what — you just did something that was good for all three parties.
Jen Weaver Welcome back to Live Chat with Jen Weaver, I'm so glad you're here.
Today's guest is a master of scaling support without losing the soul of the team. Alex Armstead is the principal business operations manager at Clever — yes, the Clever that powers classrooms for 60% of US schools. But what really sets Alex apart is how he climbed from support agent, to head of support, and now to BizOps leader, all at the same company over nearly a decade. Plus, he's a super dynamic speaker and has amazing strategies for building psychological safety on support teams.
In this episode we dig into how Alex builds trust-first leadership cultures, helps senior ICs grow without needing to manage people, and uses systems like peer QA, anonymous Q&As, culture surveys, and postmortems to turn psychological safety into a strategic advantage.
Whether you're a support leader, an aspiring ops pro, or just someone who wants your team to actually enjoy working together, this episode is for you. And remember, this podcast is sponsored by Supportman, which connects Intercom to Slack and uses AI to give agents feedback and surface problems in real time. Let's dig in.
Welcome, I am so excited to have you here. Would you just introduce yourself a little bit?
Alex Hi Jen, thanks for having me. My name is Alex Armstead, I am a business operations professional. I work at a company called Clever, which is in the K-12 education tech space. I've been at the company for almost nine years, so I really love the company, love what I do.
Jen Nine years.
Alex Nine years, it's crazy. I'm a unicorn in the tech world.
I started my career actually as a support professional — well, actually I started as a high school band and orchestra teacher.
Jen So it's K-12 education. Exactly.
Alex Exactly. So I moved into the edtech space as a support agent, ended up really loving that space and moved into management. And then really realized I had an affinity and a passion for supporting people behind the scenes internally, which BizOps gets to do every day. Instead of unlocking support for external customers, I'm basically the support team for our internal customers here at Clever.
Jen That's really cool. And I think that connects the dots for us, because our listeners are support managers and customer services teams, and so you are essentially supporting those teams. Am I getting that right?
Alex Exactly. My business partners, the people on my teams, they bring me problems and I'm there to bring solutions. It might be a recommendation, it might be a new process, it could be data to help unlock a question that they have. But in the end it's the same line of work — little puzzles every day. It's just an internal versus an external stakeholder.
Jen You describing your history has me thinking I could do 10 podcast episodes with you. Especially right now with AI taking a lot of support jobs — or actually, let me say it this way, with AI taking the easier support conversations, a lot of people in support are looking to get more advanced and to specialize and maybe move into ops like you have.
But I don't think that's what you're here to talk about today. What is the process that you'd like to share with us?
Alex Today I would love to talk about how you build a really psychologically safe organization, and build relationships between leadership and individuals to really unlock a more advanced organization, a more mature organization, and how you serve your customers every day.
Jen So if you're just starting out on this journey, what's the first thing that you would do to start building that team?
Alex The first thing is you've got to hire the right people. And by people, I mean that leader.
So often, especially in tech, especially at smaller companies, people bring in people that are really good at their functional expertise but aren't necessarily the greatest people leaders themselves. Meaning — who are those people that would be an amazing person to work for, regardless of the job function? Hopefully you want that person who also knows how to bring the best support possible for customers.
Jen That brings up for me a thing I've heard a lot, which is you can teach technical skills but people skills are harder to teach, and it's important to hire for those. So how do you do that? What's the key to finding those people?
Alex First and foremost it's a lot about your interview process, and how you describe that role in the job description.
All the time we see a lot of qualifications about hitting KPIs, or being able to wrangle your Zendesk or Intercom instance — but not nearly enough do you see something about developing talent, creating an engaged and excited team with long retention. Those line items in the JDs are often missing, but are really critical to finding someone that is people-first and not just process- and support-first.
Jen So that starts with the job description, and it starts with leadership, and then from there you're hiring the rest of the team for that people-centered perspective.
Alex Absolutely. The second thing is, once you have someone in seat — we often have expectations of what someone needs to be doing in their role when it comes to individual contributors. And often when you're coming into a leadership role, I have that 90-day plan: how are you going to integrate with your team in the first 90 days, and how are you going to make sure that that team is set up for success?
Often at a company we see that there are consistent expectations for individual leaders at the company — so head of this group or that function. However, there's not often a definition that's consistent and has a very clear expectation of what the company's ethos and expectations are for a manager. So what do we expect of a leader, or of a model, or someone who is a great coach, regardless if they're in engineering, finance, or in support?
Jen So this is really a company-wide effort to set expectations for people-centricity?
Alex Exactly. Good leadership does not foster itself within a silo. I need you, Jen — because I'm not going to have an answer to everything at my company. I'm going to go into that leadership channel in Slack and ask a question when I have something that maybe I'm just not good at, or I don't know how to guide someone through that friction point or pain point that they have.
But if I can lean on all the other leaders at my company who are also people-centric and are just wanting everyone to be successful professionals who want to stay at that company as long as possible — that is going to allow me to have that community that we often find in support external of our own companies. Look at all of our communities that we build around support leadership. I love that they exist, but I want everyone to have that same leadership community within their own company as well.
Jen And so if you're at a company where maybe that's not quite where you want it to be, do you have advice for how to build that leadership culture in a company where maybe you came in and your task is to shift it a little bit?
Alex I think it's important for you to look at who is in those executive positions around you, and especially within your people operations or your HR team. Because really there needs to be a function or an executive sponsor at your company who's going to make sure that you're not doing it alone.
There needs to be someone who's going to say, we're going to help create programming on how to be an excellent people leader. We're going to make sure that we get together in study groups and talk about a concept and revisit it a few months later to see how it's going, and go on this journey together.
The most impactful thing I ever did was go on a full two-year leadership journey with a cohort at my company, where we tackled one module at a time, taking various aspects of leadership — whether it be communication, or conflict modes, or how do you foster a growth plan. It was by going through that step by step with the people around me, but of course led by someone who could focus on that full-time, which unfortunately I can't as a support leader.
So you need to have an executive leadership sponsor who can help ensure that the entire company makes a space and builds the time in order to build and maintain these spaces for leadership.
Jen That's fascinating to me. This whole leadership journey that you went on with modules — was that a course that you took, or something someone on your team created?
Alex We did hire some external resources who have expertise in coaching leadership, and this was really focused on middle management.
Executive coaching is separate from just being a great people manager itself. So we did focus on what does it mean to be in the middle — because so often a support manager, whether it be the director or even a direct-line support manager or lead, often they feel pitted in between the individual contributors that they are passionately trying to support, and the priorities of the directors and executive level.
So having something focused not just on executive leadership but middle management, which is a skill in and of itself, I think is really key.
Jen Executive coaching is a thing you can hire out, and also this sort of leadership coaching — two separate things?
Alex Completely separate.
Jen Can you tell me a bit about that?
Alex You don't have to be a manager to be a great leader. A lot of the same lessons that we often throw at just our leaders that are a leader in title really should be made available to anyone that is in a more mature role, or in a higher level of the organization, even if they're just an individual contributor.
I'm a great example. I formerly was the head of support, but in what I do in business operations now, I'm just a really high-level individual contributor. I don't manage anyone, but I have incredible influence and impact over my organization. And as a result, I need to have those same great communication and leadership and change management skills as a director or a head of, in order to be effective in my role.
Jen That's a really interesting point, because we're kind of exploding that model right now — of individual contributors, and then managers, and then middle managers, and then execs. Your role is a good example of how individual contributors can be at a very high level and have a lot of impact, and need a lot of that leadership coaching without even a direct report.
Alex And I think it becomes even more critical if you have a team that is highly engaged and you have longer tenure, because you're not always going to be able to open up new leadership roles that are management in order to allow someone to continue to grow within your organization.
Jen Can we dig into that for a minute? I've been in that position where I've been somewhere for six or seven years and I haven't moved past individual contributor. But I've known people too who maybe didn't want to but still wanted to grow. What's possible there?
Alex So often what I try to lean into is what I call strategic projects.
How do you give someone who is not just managing writing new articles for a product, but actually giving them true business challenges of how do we scale this product? Say we have 100 customers that use this product and 20% of them write in every year. Give them a strategic project to say, how can we reduce that to only 10% over the next 12 months?
Give them an open-ended business problem and allow them to think about all the rich solutions that they might be able to take in order to influence that result. Those are things that people get really excited about and are really meaningful, rather than just checking the box on a project that's almost pre-planned for them.
Jen Meaningful because it affects revenue.
Alex Exactly. And I'm not saying that we don't need people doing those more entry-level projects that are checking the boxes, keeping things up to date. Those are absolutely mission-critical to keeping the lights on and customers happy.
But when you start getting to that six or seven year mark, people need something that allows them to really stretch themselves and think creatively, and not be so prescriptive about what you're asking them to do.
Jen I feel like this ties right into your topic of building trust, because your individual contributors know that you've got their back and you're thinking about their long-term life cycle, and their needs as an elder employee.
Alex Elder employee, for sure.
People can only tackle nebulous projects — especially if they have an influence on the bottom line, such as revenue, retention, churn, things of that nature — they can only do that if they know that they can fail, or not succeed.
That's different than a compensation goal, something that you might be literally tied to, the dollars that come into your checking account. Versus what are things that, regardless if the metric follows, the inputs were absolutely right and necessary and good for us long term.
We often have a framework that we use at Clever where we try to think about every decision through the lens of: is it good for the customer, is it good for the business, is it good for the team? And if you can say yes to all three of those, it's okay if you actually fail when it comes to the metric — because the systems that you set up, the processes that you create, the data that you get as a result, all informs how you're going to adapt in the future. You just set yourself up with a great base point to start, and you're better than when you started.
Jen I love that. And it highlights how something can be good for the customer but not good for the business. If you decide to give away your product for free, then the business doesn't exist, and ultimately that's not good for the customer any more. So they're all these levers that have to work together.
Alex Absolutely. And sometimes that is a difficult skill to teach to support agents, because they have so much ethos for people that are on the front lines.
So zooming out and thinking about the actual business impact and what we need to accomplish — whether it be for your private equity partners, or just people that are shareholders. In the end this has to be a profitable business. If not, no one gets paid, and you can't be doing the good work for the people in the end.
Jen So that's good for no one.
Alex Exactly. Sometimes you have to go out of the things that seem obvious and really feel good, to the things that actually have a broader impact, because in the end it allows our company to exist and provide this great service to those that we have so much empathy and passion for.
Jen That touches on advancement. We were talking about people staying in individual contributor level roles — but whether it's as an IC or moving up to management, how do you empower your team to know what the path is at your organization? Because I think that really builds trust.
Alex At most mature companies you should have some form of an actual career pathway document or artifact. Something that says, here is generally what is available to you based off of each stage of your journey.
For example, at Clever we do not generally see people going directly from a support position to a customer success manager, just based off of our comp, our company, our needs, and the maturity of our different organizations. It makes much more sense for us, and for the success of that individual coming into the seat, to go from support to our onboarding and implementation team, and then going into success.
Just because you're really great at technical support doesn't mean you can think about the actual realities of being a CSM. Beyond having those career pathways explicitly drawn out, it's really being able to describe what does the day-to-day look like in each of these roles. Because being a CSM is not just getting to talk to customers and having a great time — it is absolutely having a goal behind the scenes of how you want to grow the business, and in which manner, and influencing customers to hopefully agree that that is a win-win for them as well.
There are a lot of metrics and strategies and motions that happen that you, being in support, may not realize, but are actually part of the innate pressures day-to-day of being a customer success manager.
Jen An aside about that — it sounds like your team really prioritizes promoting from within. And it seems like that probably saves you a lot of money on acquisition of external team members. Am I getting that right?
Alex Hiring is so expensive, Jen. Even if you don't know that right out there — hiring is extremely expensive. Retention is the best play possible, whether it be in the same seat or moving within the organization, that internal mobility.
Recruiting and hiring great people is very difficult, especially in this tech market. If you're in tech right now and you're hiring, any role is going to have well over a thousand applicants in less than seven days.
Jen Oh, that's painful.
Alex It is painful. The good news, Jen, is there are a lot of great people that are applying. There's a tremendous talent pool that you get to pull from — but it takes time and money and energy on both sides of the spectrum in order to get someone in seat.
So for us we really do love promoting from within, because we want long-term retention. The relationships and the product knowledge and everything else that you bring from each and every role allows you to scale into that next role even faster.
So often we focus solely on just the product knowledge. Being a great success manager takes more than just knowing the product and what it can do for a customer. You also need internally to have relationships with people in product and engineering and marketing. And you establish those in every single role within the organization.
And if support's not getting those relationships in the organization, I encourage you as a leader to think about how you can make those available. Because having that full team to support the customer — not just the support team supporting the customer — really does make a difference and an impact.
Jen So how, if you're able to share, do you connect your support specialists to other teams to build that cross-functional knowledge?
Alex Unfortunately we can't always make it happen for every single support team member. But an example for us is that we have three frontline managers that are directly managing our support team members, and we have each of them aligned with a different product and engineering team.
We have multiple product and engineering teams focused on different features and aspects of our platform. So we have a manager that is there to make sure that we're not only bringing voice of customer but bringing back updates and building relationships — and we always bring some of our more senior people that serve as stakeholders for those conversations.
So that manager is bringing to every product and engineering meeting, which also has a marketing person in it, two or three senior people from their team, and rotating them as necessary based off the topics, to ensure that others are getting exposure. And the support team member not only gets to share their expertise, but build those relationships and understand more of what other people do at the company and what they care about.
Jen That's brilliant. And it sounds like that makes that pathway really clear. I'm on the support team, I know that I'm expected to contribute especially as I get more experience, and then I know if I want to move forward in my career I might go over to onboarding. So I'm going to build the skills needed for that, and probably that's part of your pathway — what skills are needed.
Alex Absolutely. It's what skills are needed, and also how does someone want to grow.
Because maybe you're a great support agent, but based off of your life and how much newness you can tolerate at any one time — remember, you've got to keep the personal life and the professional life in balance. If my personal life is a little crazy right now, I may be happy just staying in seat and not having newness in my professional life. But if you're ready for newness, it could be a brand new role, it could be just new opportunities.
Something that I love even internally here is you can build opportunities within the role by just building bandwidth. Speaking of psychological safety — something that we do at our company, because we've developed a lot of psychological safety, is we actually do peer-to-peer quality assurance reviews.
So although we have quality assurance specialists that are dedicated full-time to coaching and mentoring our team members on working with customers, we also do peer-to-peer grading. You and I might be assigned to each other that week, and I'm going to review three of your customer interactions and you'll review three of mine, and we share our insights and learnings.
Well, eventually that program doesn't become as effective as someone gets four to five years into the role. It turns out if you do something for four to five years, you're typically pretty darn good at it. So what we do is we actually graduate people out of peer-to-peer, and that builds the opportunity for them to become something like a product and engineering sponsor, to be in those conversations. Because they're no longer spending that hour and a half each week in peer-to-peer grading, but instead they're getting to work more with product.
Jen So it's not just a pathway from support to onboarding, it's a pathway within support. As I mature as an agent, I get more responsibility and maybe a little less oversight.
Alex Exactly. And that's the beautiful thing about internal activities versus external activities. We always have to respond to customer requests, that is never going to change. But internally you can always be revisiting: why are we doing this? Is it still having a positive impact? And if it's not, should we still be doing it?
Are we doing it just for the sake of rinse and repeat, or "that's always the way we've done it"? Or is this a great opportunity to think about how we can continue to grow and mature and find better opportunities to really become the best organization we can be?
Jen Do you think there's an ideal proportion between internal and external activities for an individual contributor — maybe 50% in the queue with customers and 50% working on internal projects? Or is there a different percentage that you think works best?
Alex Oh, that's a tough one, Jen. Especially because every company has a different staffing model.
At Clever we shoot for a 70% utilization rate. So 70% of time being spent on customer-facing activities, and that's inclusive of time in meetings or out of office — people go on vacation, they don't need to be in the queue 24/7.
So in the end we aim to have our agents working on internal things about five hours a week. About one hour per day on other activities. And we find that as long as they get an hour of meaningful activity that's not focused on just work in the queue, that's often meaningful enough to start building those skills that will eventually get them to being able to tackle some of those really interesting strategic projects.
Jen That's really interesting to know. Just to shift gears a little bit — I know we had talked a little bit about surveys and how those can build trust. Can you launch me into that?
Alex Absolutely. I'm a big proponent that before you can have really candid in-the-moment psychological safety and conversations, first you need to be able to trust that people leader — as we talked about, hiring leadership that are people-centric and also have those functional skills.
But then after that, finding ways for people, before they maybe have that full relationship with you, to really provide feedback in a way that is psychologically safe — but also just a little bit more anonymous.
We're really lucky here at Clever that we have a tool called Culture Amp that allows us to regularly provide surveys to our team members, whether it be just at the support level or at the company level, that allows them to purely and anonymously provide feedback. That could be about their manager, it could be about our business strategy, it could be about how they feel about their position.
As much as we love Google surveys and things of that nature, there are tools out there that just give you much more rich and robust data. Culture Amp, for example, allows us to automatically collect — without identifying the individual — tenure. So how is the sentiment for those that are in their first year versus three years versus five plus years? How are we doing against our male versus female dynamics, or non-binary?
Though you can collect all that stuff in person, if you collect that email address in a Google form — it's a lot better if you can collect it behind the scenes while maintaining anonymity by grouping by cohorts. This platform, for example, will not build a cohort if it's less than four people. So knowing that every cohort has at least four people really reduces the chance that someone feels like they're going to be outed in some way for the feedback that they might be providing.
Jen Which absolutely squashes feedback. Because if I feel like if I give negative feedback then I'll be punished for that in some way, or singled out, then I'm absolutely not going to do that.
Alex No, absolutely. It's one thing to leave a score — but the most rich data that you get are the comments. And so often, if it's a small team, those comments are not going to come, because they're too worried about you recognizing their tone.
Especially in the support world. In the support world you see a lot of their written or verbal communication, whether it be just working with them, or actually monitoring their cases, or listening in on a phone conversation.
So actually, for people leaders out there, I highly recommend if you want to encourage comments, encourage your people to throw any of their written feedback into an AI and give it something like "make it more formal," change the tone, just change up that wording. Because it's going to move it just enough that it's not going to sound like Jen any more. It's going to sound like Matt, I don't know, or someone general.
Jen That's brilliant, and it never would have occurred to me. I love that.
Alex We encourage our people explicitly to do that, because we know that we want to contextualize those numbers, and the only way we can do that is by getting those written comments that often people are too afraid to leave because they feel that their personal tone or how they write something might be outed.
Jen That brings tears to my eyes, just the dedication that your team has to really listening to anonymous feedback and making sure that it really is anonymous. It's just so supportive of the individual.
Alex It happens because we actually do stuff about it. So often there are surveys and you never hear the results. Or we hear the results, but there's no action planning.
Every time we do those surveys, the next thing that we do is that we look at it as a leadership team and then we say, hey, what are our biggest areas of opportunity? What are the biggest things that we need to continue doing? I think we don't often talk enough about the things that are going great and we need to double down on.
And then we take those to the team, and then we go one step further. So we don't just ask them "well, how would you like things changed" — we actually build little action planning teams. Say we have three themes on things that we want to work on, items A, B, and C. We then have one leader as the sponsor for each of those initiatives, but we actually then bring in three to four team members that are on that action planning committee. So that it is the team itself, not just management, coming up with the solutions and how we're going to move forward and make things better.
Jen It sounds like that mirrors what you said earlier about product teams and a support manager bringing in three or four of their reports to help with product and on that cross-functional team. It sounds like that's a model that works really well.
Alex I really do think so, because not only do you get more voices in the room, but that is a coaching moment. As a manager you're coaching team members on how to think — well, that's a great idea, but have you thought about this thing that we're going to need to tackle as a result? The cause and effect.
It's really interesting when a support team member first gives product feedback. They're constantly logging that voice of customer. Well, they may not realize how a product manager or engineer might think about that feedback and how they might interpret it.
So actually getting those voices in the room and hearing how different teams think, what values they bring to the table, what their priorities are — they need to experience that firsthand. I can't teach them this by just telling them "well, product wants to know how it relates to ARR." Support team members just don't resonate with that. But what they do resonate with is, hey, I know Jeremy, he's a really nice guy, he's the product manager for this area. I get to hear his words and how he thinks about it directly from him. And it just kind of is a lightbulb moment for them, often, just to get them in the same room, hearing and thinking through things in a different perspective in a way that they can't do if you just silo support team members by themselves.
Jen It really strikes me how your efforts to build trust really seem to go hand in hand with building the support specialists' abilities and skills and cross-functional connections. It seems like those really are almost the same.
Alex Exactly. I want someone who is more than just a support agent who regurgitates answers and solves tickets. I want someone that can solve business problems.
Similar to how I talk about business ops being basically a support team member but internally — I want an agent to be the same thing. I want them to just be a universal problem solver, whether the problem is brought to them by a customer, or whether it's brought by their manager as a great business problem that they can work on as a strategic project.
Jen And that's what you did moving from support to BizOps. You basically do the same thing, just for a different audience.
Alex Different group of people, different audience, just more time and more experience. It's by scaffolding all those day-to-day and quarter-to-quarter experiences, and just having that exposure, those conversations with the product managers of the world, that slowly allows you to tackle the bigger and bigger problems.
Jen I know we are coming up to the end of our time, and you have a couple more things to share with us — about monthly Q&As, and also retrospectives after busy seasons.
Alex Exactly. The other two things that have been really pivotal for our team, really unlocking our fullest potential — as I mentioned, we do monthly Q&A sessions with support leadership and with the teams themselves.
We have a really cool tool internally that we use at Clever that allows them to submit feedback, whether anonymous or with their name attached. And then there's voting, and you can add comments, and we answer those directly live in our team meetings. So we reserve 30 minutes out of our hour to just tackle those challenges straight on.
It's a little awkward at first — they sometimes wonder, can I ask that question? But by allowing people to upvote and submit anonymously at first, and just seeing that you can see the list of all the questions that were submitted and we're going to answer every single one, whether it be right now verbally or following up in writing — it just really engenders that anything can be asked. And you can even ask things twice.
I can't tell you the number of times at a company level we've asked our E-team about matching 401(k). Well, hasn't happened, but doesn't mean we don't keep asking that question. And so support team members might have the same question about, hey, do we really need to be on two hours of support phone shifts? Or do you think you're finally going to open that third spot for a new quality assurance specialist?
So there might be things that are "not yet, but thank you for asking." But in the end there are a lot of great questions that come in. I think too often we don't create regular forums for people to ask questions. We assume that people will bring their questions in one-on-ones. Well, there's something that is really strong about having the support of your peers around you standing by you when you ask a question.
Jen And I think sometimes in one-on-ones, individual contributors can feel a little bit like they're still being graded — like I still need to impress my manager so I can get a promotion eventually. And so that gives a completely anonymous space for that to happen. I love that.
Alex One-on-ones are intimidating. Especially if the answer can't be answered by your frontline manager — maybe it is the director or a VP that needs to answer that. Well, that's even more intimidating. Do you really want to put that time on their calendar? Do you know how you want to say it? Maybe you really just want to put it in ChatGPT and say, make this more clear and more concise.
So the nice thing about having a written Q&A up front is not only that it's less intimidating, but it allows both sides to prepare. The question asker gets to prepare how they want to ask it, so they can be more thoughtful, to make sure that they're probing for the right answer. And also the person who wants to answer the question can be more thoughtful — because guess what, most leaders don't know every single answer off the cuff. Maybe they actually need to talk to an HR specialist about something, or talk to their own manager.
So a great thing about a formalized Q&A, especially with questions asked up front, is it allows everyone to prepare, and therefore to have more thoughtful engagements.
Jen It's really supportive of people who may be more shy or more hesitant. I'm super eloquent with words, as you can tell right now — but someone else who might just not feel like they could say exactly what they need right on the spot, or somebody who doesn't necessarily always speak up, it allows them to also have a voice. Which I love.
Alex Exactly. Different interaction styles and different processing styles.
Jen Processing styles. I feel like we could talk about that for a whole episode.
But just to make sure we get in your last amazing idea — busy seasons can be really stressful for support teams. At the end of a sprint in the queue, essentially, you kind of go, okay, what just happened? How do you run that?
Alex Of course, I must say, my brain as a BizOps person — it's always busy season. My brain is already thinking to the next busy season while I'm in the busy season, creating that list of all the things I should not forget about before next year.
I think that too often, for one, a lot of teams only think about busy seasons in terms of staffing. We often don't think about what are all the things that we can do to make that busy season better, whether it be through process, or even best in my opinion as a BizOps person, eliminating those tickets entirely.
So what we do is we do multiple postmortems. Each sub-team — so each manager directly with their individual contributors and the people that they manage — they do an individual postmortem that focuses on anything and everything. It could be how we work together. How was the work-life balance? Did you have the resources you needed? Were there any product areas that really just blew up on us, or things that we need to address from that perspective? Anything is fair game. It's all about just getting as many sticky notes onto that virtual or in-person whiteboard as possible.
Then we synthesize those as a full support team. So we'll bring across sub-teams: what are the themes? What are the things that just sub-team C needs some help with, versus hey, sub-team A is really great at that, they didn't feel that.
So we try to build our insights as a full team, and we try to do that as quickly as possible. If you are even close to being at the bottom of that peak, immediately — that's when we want to hold those postmortems, when that pain is still acute and you have all these insights still top of mind.
Jen That's got to be hard, to just be like, we're tired but we're going to push through and do this.
Alex So hard, especially with vacations, because we're basically throwing vacations at people then. We finally have the time for you to take some rest, go take a week off, we don't want to hear from you, we'll see you soon. So scheduling is always a little tricky.
But what's great for us is that doing it that soon allows us to have typically around nine months to then project plan and come up with how are we going to tackle all the things that we want to improve, for our people, for our process, for our customers, in order to have a smoother season next year.
And for us it means less overtime every year. It means fewer tickets year over year, even though the company keeps growing.
So really being thoughtful about having a postmortem or multiple after every busy season will not only make next season better, but it's going to build some of those growth opportunities that we talked about earlier. Because you're going to have more projects than you could possibly tackle in a single year, but you're going to have plenty of people that want to tackle those things and take those opportunities to take their career and their professional growth to the next level.
Jen And you probably gain this data year after year, so you can see if something didn't really make it to a full project and didn't get tackled for maybe two or three years in a row — that gives it a different level of importance if it still persists.
Alex Absolutely. Having a goal, for example, of fewer tickets next year is way too generic. You can't possibly tackle that. But can you say, for these three topics we are going to try everything that we can do through customer education, through product improvements, through process improvements, to lower those? Yeah, that I can do. That I can track, that I can monitor the success of.
So as long as you have focused, clear goals that are attainable, then it's really meaningful. And guess what? It's really great for your team members at their end of year reviews, when they're ready for that promotion — they have data other than support tickets to show how they're having great impact at your company.
Jen That is fantastic. This is going to be such a boon for our audience. Thank you so much for being here. I could just talk to you all day, you're a delightful human being.
Alex It's been so much fun, love getting to chat with your smiling face. Thank you.
Jen Phew. That was a lot of actionable information in one podcast. So let's go back through the five top things Alex shared to do to create psychological safety on a team. And I love number one.
But first, if you like this podcast's focus on tactical processes and you use Intercom, check out Supportman for instant AI quality review in Slack.
All right. Alex's step one: establish a support advancement continuum. When people know what they need to do to advance in their role and exactly what that looks like, they feel a lot more supported.
Two: conduct biannual manager culture surveys. This ensures that feedback doesn't just go from the top down, but also back up to managers and senior managers so that they can improve too.
Three: create action plans post-survey. So you're not just gathering that information about what leaders can do better — actually acting on it.
Four: host monthly Q&A sessions with leadership.
Five: conduct postmortems after busy seasons. This acknowledges that your frontline specialists go through the wringer during a busy season, and that they have a ton of actionable feedback about how your processes are working at scale, and that you want to capture that.
All of these things will ensure that your team really loves being there, really feels supported, and hopefully will stay with you for a long time.
I'd love to see more teams implement these strategies. So please reach out, let us know what you think, and of course subscribe for more great episodes like this. See you next time.