How Documentation is Your Secret RevOps Weapon for Scaling | A Deep Dive, Part 2

[JenBergren]

In my previous blog, I talked about what documentation is, who’s in charge of it, and revealed why it is the secret weapon of RevOps: it helps you scale your business.

Though all parts of RevOps can help your company scale in different ways, I would argue that without documentation, any improvements you make in other areas will not be repeatable, efficient, or consistent. 

Documentation ties all major parts of RevOps together, across all teams that RevOps works with, because it helps people consistently and efficiently use processes that use tech. People, processes, and tools/tech are the three most common areas of RevOps, a conclusion drawn from the data in my interviews of 35 experts in 2020. 

How documentation can help you scale 

There are many ways documentation can help you scale, and you could probably write a whole blog about each one.

There are many benefits to documentation in relation to scaling your customer base, but we’re going to mainly focus on the internal side of scaling: quickly increasing the number of employees at a company.

Documentation:

• Allows you to more easily improve your processes. You can’t change something if you don’t know who, what, where, when, or why something is happening already. 
• Allows all the people involved to easily see and agree on the process that is actually happening now, compared to what SHOULD be happening. It also helps identify where and why the breakdown is occurring, and how to fix it.
• Allows your processes to be more consistent, so solving a problem with a process is easier to diagnose, if everyone is running the process the same way
• A huge hurdle to consistency is when you only pass knowledge verbally in a meeting, for every person, every time they have the same question. This forces the other person to take their own private notes. Like a game of telephone, each person’s private notes won’t match, especially as each person makes updates, so people won’t be completing the work in a consistent, efficient way. 
• Makes iterating and experimenting more efficient. Document those experiments so you don’t have people trying the same things over and over again because they didn’t know someone else had tried it, they don’t remember the outcomes of the past experiments, they don’t know the starting point so couldn’t track the improvements...RevOps can enable the teams to experiment in an efficient, effective, easily documented way
• Allows your current employees to be more efficient so you could also scale your customer base without needing the same ratio of employees per customer.
• It allows internal teams to quickly “self-help” find the information they need in real-time, and complete their work faster since they don’t need to remember how to do it.
• Allows you to onboard, train, and see new employees succeed faster and individually help increase revenue faster, since you’re no longer passing information and answering questions on a one-to-one basis.
• Allows you to onboard new Ops employees and for them to contribute higher-level, strategic work faster, instead of spending every day on the cleanup work resulting from your tech debt and documentation debt. 
• Documentation could help untangle all the issues of tech debt when a new person starts working at the company and has no idea what is going on inside any of the tools, what any of the processes are, who are the people involved, when does everything need to happen, why things were done a certain way...being the first Ops hire is tough!
• Allows team members to promote faster because training their replacement is easier if they’ve documented everything they did in the current role. This helps build additional job levels at your company faster, which helps retain more employees as you scale.
• Allows you to hire faster since you can attract a broader talent pool if you are remote and asynchronous, a style of work that requires documentation since meetings aren’t possible in so many time zones. 
• Removes barriers or inequality between in-office and remote workers, if everyone has access to the same information, which helps your company retain employees as it scales. 
• Helps cross train team members and allows them to easily take vacation and sick days without stress (for them) or disruption (for the company), which will help you scale by retaining your team and attracting new employees in tough hiring markets.
• My remote, flex-time company is able to offer a 30 hour workweek benefit as a result of documenting so much of our business since we started two years ago. This has been key to attracting new talent and efficiently onboarding our team when we doubled our size this year. (Look for a future blog on this topic!)
  
  

How has documentation helped your company scale and made your job easier? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Stay tuned for part 3 of this series: RevOps best practices for documentation.