When I joined Bud Financial as the very first Technical Delivery Director, I landed in the middle of the typical start up chaos. Bud was a Series B Fintech with an impressive roster of Enterprise names like HSBC, TSB and Transunion. I’d lived on both sides of the Enterprise/Fintech delivery relationship but never at such a small shop.
My new team had mandates, processes and a tool stack that had grown organically through several business model pivots. Not much was written down, and what was often made no sense because it was for a product or function that no longer existed. The team were absolute legends, but every engagement required heroics, and the core KPIs seemed to be locked permanently to “disappointing”.
I sat down at my shiny new laptop and created a folder called “Project Boring”.
My goal was to remove the stress and chaos from my team’s life – make sure they knew what to do without having to escalate up the chain, where to find all the things that they needed to do their jobs well, and what good looked like. I wanted to make the day-to-day work boring, so we could concentrate on more exciting things.
This is a playbook that has served me well my whole career. If your team feels like they’re drowning, lower the water level. Chaos is created by customer work, for sure, but I think it’s underappreciated how much is created by the way we handle that work. In an emergency room (or A&E depending on where you are), the chaos comes through the door non-stop, but the staff don’t add to it. In fact, certainty of method in the face of that chaos is not only how they cope, but how they deliver impossible outcomes every day.
We couldn’t control the customer (yet – that’s a story for another time), but we did have complete agency over how we did our work. We take what we do have control over and ensure that it only ever produces the results we want. This dramatically lowers the number of things that can go sideways, and turns situations from chaotic into nice and boring.
The details of what I did during “Project Boring” are unsurprisingly too boring to spend much time on. It was the stuff everyone talks about and never does.
It did however finally unstick our delivery KPIs. TTV dropped from unbearably long to sub 30 days for our API clients. Support ticket resolution time dropped by 68%. And unsurprisingly, our customers were very happy – CSAT on our onboarding process climbed to 100% and stayed there quarter after quarter. I told you they were legends.
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