Programmatic Team Thought Exercise: "Top Gun" Structure
As part of our thought-leadership and experiment development for programmatic team structure I will be exploring different team scenarios from the everyday to the ridiculous. In today's episode, what if we were to create a programmatic team that works like a team of fighter pilots? That may sound silly, but let me elaborate.
Picture this, your agency has 30 programmatic team members of various expertise levels, work styles, and secret weapons. Until today those 30 people have been split up into 6 teams with a supervisor leading 5 traders and working on 3-5 accounts. It's worked pretty well, the only real issues seem to be holiday coverage, and there has been some turnover bubbling up to the surface. Everyone has been managing, there's no current budget set for hiring and the team says they don't have bandwidth for new projects. In short, we're at an impasse where revenue cannot increase to support further raises or hires without a really flexible leadership/accounting team. But today - it all changes, because the programmatic team has now deployed the Top Gun team design.
When you walk into work each morning you find the traders gathering around the briefing board, drinking coffee & getting mentally prepared for the day. The briefing board shows there are 30 active campaigns, 4 of which are under-pacing, 2 are below client benchmarks. Half of the traders are off-duty for hands-on keyboard work, as they rotate in a schedule similar to a firehouse; these proggers are splitting their time between relaxation, training, strategy and QA on a 4-day work week. The other 15 traders will be assigned 2 campaigns for the day depending on the tasks required, this will complete the mornings trading missions. After lunch the 15 on-duty traders will regroup to complete the next steps in planning/building for upcoming campaigns.
The programmatic experts who've graduated from trading work and lead training, thought-leadership, personal development and client/partner relationships cannot be tied down on client work except to help a trader in need of assistance. These people must be available to drive progress and make sure traders are happy.
Leaders should be involved and look for creative ways to encourage innovation and performance, through bounties for reaching important client milestones or rewards for consecutive error-free campaigns.
This type of programmatic team setup should relieve trader stress through increased flexibility and collaboration, the amount of deduplicated effort (reinventing processes, new pacing docs, new campaign creation setup, or taxonomy updates) we could eliminate by working together ... my goodness.
Thots? Kwestchens?