Category: CS Operations
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Nobody Defined Done
What Building GitLab’s Customer Usage Predictions Taught Me About Outcome-First Deployments I have a theory. I think most deployments fail not because of bad technology but because nobody defined “done” before the work started. It really is a litany of things (bad fit customer, loss of exec sponsor, competitor undercut, product issues, etc.), but I…
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I Got Eight Weeks of Analysis Done in an Afternoon.
A Practitioner’s Guide to VSM and VSA in Knowledge Work Eleven months after launching a new expense approval system, I discovered that Stage 2 — the gap between Finance approval and Payables processing — was eating more than half of total cycle time. The bottleneck wasn’t the approval chain. It was the queue after approval.…
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Building a Finance Approval System From Scratch
We Built a System So We Wouldn’t Fly Blind Anymore. In late 2023, we identified a problem with how our finance team processed expense reimbursements, cash advances, and petty cash requests. The process worked… most of the time. But it was tenuous. Approvals happened in email, which meant requests sometimes got lost, went to the…
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Product Usage Data Strategy (A Nerd’s View)
“We have data gaps preventing us from knowing what our customers are doing. We have some manual workarounds, but we are flying pretty blind.” I hear this all the time. I’ve dealt with it at every startup I’ve ever worked and almost every one I’ve consulted with. In this post, I want to share the…
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Evaluating Your (Nonexistent) Tech Stack
I recently gave a webinar and a follow-up question was “We’ve had CS for a while but now need to take a closer eye at our tech stack. We have a CRM, no one dedicated to CS Ops, and no CSM tool. What do we do?” From there, sit with these considerations: A Project Plan should incorporate at…
Jeff Beaumont 