Communication systems for effective teamwork

I am often asked for my favorite systems for creating and maintaining efficiency across teams, especially during periods of rapid growth. Having worked for and with companies large, small and everywhere in between, I have learned a lot about what it takes to keep people aligned and effective in pursuit of shared goals. The processes that work for a two person business will often break down as soon as a third employee is added. Extrapolate this to tens, hundreds and eventually thousands of people and the importance of effective communication systems becomes abundantly clear. In virtual workplaces, which are becoming more and more common, especially for digital publishers, there is a different but related set of challenges. When you are running a media business, real-time communication across your account management, adops and sales teams is critical.

We use Slack for day-to-day communication and make every effort to minimize our use of email. I’m often asked “what’s so great about Slack?” and generally struggle to provide a compelling answer. However, after a few weeks those same people are complete converts. It can be organized to match your workflow, accepts file uploads and screenshots (particularly useful for anyone in ad operations), synchs across your mobile devices and is entirely searchable. All conversations are archived so you no longer have to ask the same question multiple times. There are competitive alternatives out there (excluding google chat, which I hate) but we prefer Slack.

For projects and tasks, I use Asana both personally and for my businesses. I am able to capture anything that needs to be remembered or completed, assign tasks to teammates, structure the data in the most useful (and searchable) way for me and further customize the platform to my needs. The fact that it is web-based is a draw back in my opinion and until recently the mobile app did not function while offline (particularly annoying for someone who commutes via subway), but they are constantly making improvements. Having a tool that allows you to break projects down into actionable pieces and schedule them accordingly is among the biggest factors in delivering successful projects on time. Other options include Trello (pretty similar to Asana), GitHub (primarily for developers) and Omnifocus (great for individuals).

Google docs has proven to be the best way of creating and maintaining shared files. We use an enterprise file server, Egnyte, as well, and it is fantastic, but the ability to collaborate in real-time on shared files is extremely powerful. The biggest limitation, especially as it relates to ad ops and monetization, is the lack of functionality in Google Sheets as compared to Excel. Creating pivot tables, inserting macros, handling large data sets with complex formatting is challenging to the point of frustration. Because of this we tend to use Google Sheets only for simple reports that need to be shared in real-time.

Software and tools are only good enough if they are supported by strong, consistent internal processes. For larger teams, an effective approach for managers, especially those overseeing multiple teams, is to send out a regular communication (an email or a newsletter are the most obvious mediums) to all relevant people. I find myself constantly having individual and small group conversations that do not always filter out as I would like. Controlling the message and ensuring that everyone has all relevant info, especially as it relates to hiring, new products, major corporate initiatives and things that will affect them directly can have a significant return on a relatively small amount of time invested.

The most important thing to remember is that everyone in your organization knows what your long term objectives are and how their own work contributes to achieving those. These can and should be broken down into smaller, actionable components with shorter-term tasks. You need a place to monitor progress against those and some consistent and widely applied way of communicating within teams and as individuals. If you build your foundation on those principles, you’ll be well on your way to operating as a world-class team.

How smaller publishers can act bigger

In speaking with publishers large and small on a daily basis, one common theme I’ve found is that they all strive to punch above their weight class when it comes to their ad stack and operational workflow. They want to use the latest technologies. They want to have access to the best demand sources while ignoring the worst. They want a world class team that is up to speed on the latest macro forces driving the market. They want to package their inventory and assets in the most advantageous way possible, following best practices across the industry.

Having seen the full spectrum of publisher businesses, from one man shops to 500+ person organizations, I can tell you that there is no such thing as growing up too early when it comes to processes and procedures. Certainly, a small, very focused team would have less need for an intranet or wiki than a distributed global workforce of thousands, but there are things every publisher can do to ensure they are in the best position to scale. Below are some ideas to inspire your own thinking.

Adserver architecture and ad tagging. In almost every situation we have walked into, the ad tagging structure of the publisher’s site is not what they would choose if they were to start from scratch today. Typically, ad unit naming conventions and overall adserver architecture was set up in the past with little thought given to the future evolution of the business. Perhaps it was set up by a developer or product manager as there was no in-house ad ops expertise available. Perhaps the site has been redesigned multiple times since the inception of their ad-supported business and the sections or content types no longer align with what is being sold. Making this a critical aspect of any project to update or redesign the site is important to maintaining a modern, adaptable framework. In the absence of any major projects or upgrades, publishers should perform a regular system audit to eliminate items that are no longer relevant and implement improvements where possible. Publishers without a direct sales team may not see the benefit of architecting a system that allows for micro-targeting, but those with ambitions beyond passive monetization should anticipate the demands of their future advertisers. This includes contextual, keyword, behavioral and data targeting capabilities among others.

Process and procedures. Often, when there is one person running ad ops, especially if they do not have a traditional ad ops background, a complete lack of process evolves because they feel like it solidifies their value within the organization. Ultimately, however, this does more harm than good in the long run. It may be overkill to pay $10,000 per month for a sophisticated order-entry system that “automates” the initial trafficking of campaigns for a publisher that doesn’t bring in much more than that in total monthly revenue, but that doesn't mean they can't benefit from some standard procedures. Without a written understanding of how things get done, the individual or individuals responsible will never be able to take vacation and they leave a massive knowledge gap in their wake if they leave the company. Make the creation of written process documentation a part of their job description and reassure them that capturing their knowledge and expertise will allow them to accelerate their own growth rather than make them less valuable.

Communication systems. In high-pressure, real-time businesses like media and publishing, communication becomes one of the most important (yet elusive) disciplines to master. Between email, instant-message, social media, internal meetings and conference calls, we quickly become overwhelmed simply with managing the deluge, let alone actually taking control and being productive. Make this an area of excellence at your company and you will not regret it. Take the time to implement platforms like Slack and ensure every employee knows how to get the most out of them. Mandate regular one on ones between employees and managers and hold company-wide and department-specific meetings on a regular basis. Greater alignment across your company can only lead to increased efficiency and productivity.

Hiring process and expectations. When a company is smaller (think less than 10 or 20), candidates often meet with everyone within the organization, or on the other extreme with the founders only, who will make a unilateral decision. There is a balance to this where the ultimate decision maker is clearly identified yet other key stakeholders weigh in with veto power. I suggest establishing a transparent step by step process and timeline for your team and the candidates: initial screenings, phone/video interviews, in-person interviews, internal panel for final decisions. It is very important not to rush hiring decisions as their impact - both positive and negative - will be felt long after they’ve come and gone. I’ve said this before, but any time you have to convince yourself that a candidate is worth hiring, they are probably not the right person. Before pulling the trigger on any hire, make sure you get that “hell yes” feeling that comes with any obvious decision.

Industry visibility and trendsetting. I’ve noticed that very few small publishers attend industry events and conferences, either because they are simply too busy to spend a day outside the office or find them cost prohibitive. Sometimes these events are a waste of time, but rarely do I find myself leaving without at least one piece of actionable inspiration. Even if it is an offhand comment from the person sitting next to you at breakfast, the ability to get ahead of trends and technologies before they are forced on you allows you to control the conversation and set them up the right way from the onset. I recommend talking to trusted colleagues and asking them which conferences are their favorites and picking one or two per year to attend. This can also be an effective retention and motivation tool, as learning and growth are often cited as important factors in how long employees stay with an employer. By covering the cost of travel and attendance, you are investing in them as employees and rewarding excellent work.

Obviously this is not a complete list, but this list of tactics that small and medium sized publishers can use to compete with the incumbents should get you thinking about what you can do today to position your company for its next phase of growth.

Why is my site so slow?

Many publishers refresh their browser one day and realize that their site feels excruciatingly slow. It certainly feels slower than it used to be, especially on a mobile device, which by the way now makes up the bulk of their traffic. There may be a decline, dismissed as insignificant, in user engagement as measured by time spent or pageviews per user. Revenue or CPMs may be threatened or reaching a ceiling.

There are many possible explanations for this, all of which will vary depending on who you talk to within the organization. The codebase may have degraded over time, they may have allowed too many heavy elements to each page, there may be some backend infrastructure issues, or they may have become reliant on too many “indirect” monetization vendors. More often than not, ad ops receives the blame and must propose solutions.

In these situations, an unbiased evaluation of all demand sources is necessary, which is often easier said than done. Many publishers have legacy relationships that have been in place for years, sweetheart deals with vendors that would be hard to reestablish, and tags that no one even knows are there. Unfortunately, aside from the financial impact of removing certain elements, there is often emotional baggage that can lead to finger pointing and irrational decisions. The best approach is to take an inventory of all the pixels, tags and other calls being made, identify each vendor and assign them all a value. With this information, smart decisions can be made on what to keep and what to eliminate. Vendors with the worst latency should be called out and challenged to perform at a higher level. They all claim to have “the best technology,” and this is the perfect time for them to prove it.

Other than vendors and demand sources, the publisher’s ad stack itself can cause problems, no matter how sophisticated. Are there ad calls being made that were once necessary but now irrelevant? Are there pixels live that were implemented years ago to close a deal that has long since concluded? Does the adserver architecture even make sense for the current design and sales strategy of the site? These are all questions to ask, especially going into a new year.

A great way to do this while removing internal bias and emotions is to find an independent expert that can evaluate your site, ad stack and vendor mix to make recommendations for improving site speed, user experience and ultimately yield. If you think this might apply to your organization, we would love to discuss how we can help.

Building a world-class ad ops team

Whether you are a huge company like the New York Times or Conde Nast or a smaller publisher with a distributed workforce, you want to work with the best. You want campaign managers and traffickers who are smart, detail-oriented, solution-minded and consistently go above and beyond the basic requirements in their job description. Hiring, developing and retaining ad operations talent is one of the most difficult things publishers can do. Here are some things to consider as you build your world-class team:

HIRING

The saying “patience is a virtue” couldn’t be more applicable to conducting searches for ad ops talent. Ultimately you want to have the right people in the right roles (for you and for them) and you must often balance that with the fact that there is immediate work that must be done in order to move the business forward. A good rule of thumb is to use Derek Sivers’ rule for making any decision, which is “if it is not a HELL YES, its a no.” This means that if you are on the fence about any candidate, they are probably not the right one. This is especially true for smaller teams as they will have a larger and more direct impact on your business.

Conducting an ad ops search can often become a full time job. Depending on the breadth of your search and the number of candidates you choose to screen and interview, it can take weeks of dedicated time over the course of months. This why recruiters exist and why “media-focused” recruiters proliferate. I believe that most hires still happen via personal networks, but recruiters can add value to a particularly urgent or specific search. My advice on this stage is to be all in or all out, nothing in between. In order to move things forward quickly and successfully, you need to be fully invested and committed to finding the ideal candidate and have a clear interview and selection process.

DEVELOPING

Once you've found the perfect candidate or candidates, you must ensure they operate effectively and efficiently. They must learn the specific nuances and processes of your business. They must become experts at understanding your products and delivering value to your customers. They must keep up with a rapidly changing landscape without neglecting their day-to-day responsibilities. This requires investment in both time and capital.

Develop an official, thoughtful, documented onboarding process. Give new employees time to acclimate and get comfortable before throwing them into the deep end. Foster a culture of collaboration and internal knowledge-sharing. Encourage your team to participate in industry conferences and events. If you’re lucky enough to have a team in New York, SanFrancisco, or another media hub, there are often free local meetups where people discuss the particulars of topics that only they would understand or appreciate. 

RETAINING

Outside of finding and hiring capable ad ops candidates, retention and motivation tends to be the most difficult aspect of any ad operations manager's job. Between a relentless pace, constant technical challenges and scarcity of qualified talent, it can be extremely difficult to prevent a rockstar campaign manager from seeking out the next opportunity. Obviously you should provide things like generous compensation, flexible work schedules and other perks, but two things that consistently surface as reasons for staying at a job are a feeling of contribution to the company’s larger mission and trusting/respecting one’s boss.

People in support roles want to feel appreciated and like their work is important to the strategic mission and growth of the company. Make sure they understand that by doing their job flawlessly, not only are you able to bill campaigns in full and collect all contracted revenue, but that advertisers (and especially agencies) want to work with publishers that make their lives easier. This leads to recurring revenue and growth which funds investment and ultimately leads to a more profitable business.

Ensure that the manager of the ad ops team, whether thats you or someone else, is equipped to be successful. Make sure they understand and actively practice the fundamentals of being a good manager, that they take the time to get to know everyone on their team and set up a clear growth path with objectives and milestones, that they meet regularly in one on ones and as a team to discuss best practices and recognize exceptional work. They should provide clear feedback in real-time, both positive and negative (or constructive).

The above will not cover every myriad of challenges you will undoubtedly face as a publisher, but it does provide a blueprint for building and maintaining a high-performing team. It takes time and effort but the end result is worth it. For guidance, gut-checks and tactical execution resources that give you breathing room to methodically grow your team, we are always on standby.

Should you outsource your ad operations?

Every publisher wants to control their own destiny. With social platforms dominating the audience game and a deluge of 3rd party middlemen required for monetization, it can feel like you are being tossed about in the waves of these external forces. Your own team is something you do have control over. You want people who are experts at what they do. You want people who will be available when you need them. You want people who are as invested in the success of the business as you are. Unfortunately, finding candidates with those attributes is often easier said than done. Then, once you’ve found someone who is truly talented and engaged, the difficulty shifts to retaining and motivating them.

Outsourcing your ad operations and monetization capabilities gives you access to these critical capabilities without the accompanying HR challenges.

These are 7 reasons to outsource your ad operations:

1. Outsourcing your ad ops is almost always cheaper than hiring full time staff. When you factor in the cost of recruiting, onboarding, training and benefits it often makes sense to allow a trusted vendor to handle many of your operational functions.
2. You will have the leisure of taking more time to make smarter hires. This is one of the most critical decisions any company can make and has a tremendous impact on the existing team. By ensuring that you are not forced to make hasty decisions, you increase the probability of finding the perfect match.
3. You can access greater levels of talent and experience for far less than you would if you were to make a full time hire. Good operators are in high-demand. Those with relevant experience and deep industry connections even more so. This means they cost more and have more opportunities available to them, making recruiting and retention difficult.
4. Outsourcing accommodates ebbs and flows in workloads and activity. You won’t have staff completely overloaded one week and looking for something to do the next week.
5. You have access to a much broader set of contacts and experiences across vendors and technologies. Many traffickers and campaign managers have worked with the leading companies in the media space, but being immersed in their daily workload makes it difficult to stay current on a rapidly-changing landscape. A 3rd party that works with many publishers has the advantage of managing complex existing solutions, fielding inbound requests from new vendors, and maintaining relationships to keep abreast of the latest trends.
6. It allows your existing team to get back to their day jobs, or work on more strategic projects. Publishers often have a product or engineering resource working on their adserver, or an account manager pulling reports and devising optimization plans. These are things that detract and distract them from adding the maximum amount of value.
7. If you outsource to a group that takes the time to understand your business and build a strong relationship with you and your team, they will be deeply invested in your success. It may seem like common sense that a full-time employee would be more engaged and invested in a publisher’s growth and success, but having been on both sides of the table I have seen that ad ops teams are often simply looking for their next opportunity rather than building a long-term career by pushing the boundaries of whats possible for your site.

Hopefully, this gives you some insights as you decide how to scale your media business and whether or not to outsource your ad operations.

Getting Started

As I've said before on my personal blog, it pays to get started. No one ever looks back and wishes they waited longer to launch their business, invest in their career growth, find fulfilling volunteer opportunities. The sooner you get started, the sooner you can test, fail and learn, gather feedback, and optimize your efforts toward success.

When I founded 360ops, my ambition was to address an unfilled need in the market and control my own destiny. I noticed that existing outsourcing companies in the monetization and operations space felt cold, distant, disconnected. They did not feel like part of the publishers' team. I wanted to turn this on its head by creating deep relationships built on expertise and trust where publishers felt the same way about us as they did about their own teams.

We are currently undergoing a period of tremendous change both in the media landscape and the workforce in general. More people are working remotely. There are more opportunities outside of the traditional high school + extracurriculars > college > grad school > corporate job route. An increasing number of kids are turning those extracurriculars into brands and businesses.  Side hustles will soon be an expectation rather than a surprise. I for one plan on juggling multiple projects at any given time for the rest of my working life.

Thats not to say I will lose focus or become distracted by being "busy." If there is one lesson I have learned over the past few years, through my own experience and in reading books like The One Thing and Essentialism, its that being busy is not the same as being effective. It is all too easy to jump from fire drill to fire drill, filling each day with meetings and emails that lead to more meetings and more emails. Being productive and effective means knowing what things that you could do today that will make everything else in the future easier or unnecessary. Its an ability to separate the urgent from the important and prioritize accordingly.

Redesigning this website was one of those projects that I had on my to-do list for a very long time. A few weeks ago, I made the decision to prioritize it, ignore many other tasks and get it done. A company blog as a place to discuss efficiency and best practices in the digital media world has been on my wish list for years. Now, after some consistent focus and follow-through, we've started.