80,000 Hours has a great 2018 article on Operations management roles, which includes a ‘How to assess your fit’ section (I’ll link to it at the bottom of this take). Having worked on the EA Global team for a year now, here are two important traits I would add for assessing fit:
1) Good at task-switching. I think it’s pretty crucial that task-switching isn’t super costly for you and you can do it relatively quickly. Otherwise, I imagine many Ops roles will be quite tiring / frustrating. It might be particularly emphasised in my role, but as an anecdote: in the lead up to an event, my days are working through maybe 10+ small-medium planned tasks with a ton of small, unplanned tasks in between (i.e. monitoring Slacks/emails and responding to them if they take priority). I once mentioned this to two friends and they instinctively said, “I’m really sorry,” so I suspect reactions to this are a useful fit heuristic.
2) Responsive. This one is from a conversation with my team, and I concur—it’s really standout if you can respond to people quickly. This goes hand-in-hand with task switching (i.e. when someone messages you, how costly is it for you to stop what you’re doing and respond). It also necessitates being calibrated on how long tasks take (I’ll explain) and not hating messaging people. The level of responsiveness necessary and how often you get pinged will vary by role. I’m guessing for most Ops roles, a day or two response time is great. For some, you’ll need to generally respond within the same working day(i.e. within minutes or hours). Whether necessary or not, I think achieving this is a huge asset to any team (assuming your other work doesn’t suffer and you’re prioritising well). It means you’re: 1) quickly unblocking others; and, 2) relieving the mental load on the message-sender of tracking their own request. As a note on mental load, over-communication is almost always best in Ops roles. You might open a message and think, “I can’t get to this until tomorrow”—it’s useful to train in the habit of saying that rather than just making a note to yourself. Your coworkers will then be relieved of tracking this (though crucially, it’s important to meet the timeline you set or communicate changes). In an ideal world, your co-workers are never tracking the tasks/requests they send because you’re handling that (i.e. responding quickly or providing timelines and updates automatically).
So true! When I read the 80k article, it looks like I’d fit well with ops, but these are two important executive function traits that make me pretty bad at a lot of ops work. I’m great at long-term system organization/evaluation projects (hence a lot of my past ops work on databases), but day-to-day fireman stuff is awful for me.
80,000 Hours has a great 2018 article on Operations management roles, which includes a ‘How to assess your fit’ section (I’ll link to it at the bottom of this take). Having worked on the EA Global team for a year now, here are two important traits I would add for assessing fit:
1) Good at task-switching. I think it’s pretty crucial that task-switching isn’t super costly for you and you can do it relatively quickly. Otherwise, I imagine many Ops roles will be quite tiring / frustrating. It might be particularly emphasised in my role, but as an anecdote: in the lead up to an event, my days are working through maybe 10+ small-medium planned tasks with a ton of small, unplanned tasks in between (i.e. monitoring Slacks/emails and responding to them if they take priority). I once mentioned this to two friends and they instinctively said, “I’m really sorry,” so I suspect reactions to this are a useful fit heuristic.
2) Responsive. This one is from a conversation with my team, and I concur—it’s really standout if you can respond to people quickly. This goes hand-in-hand with task switching (i.e. when someone messages you, how costly is it for you to stop what you’re doing and respond). It also necessitates being calibrated on how long tasks take (I’ll explain) and not hating messaging people. The level of responsiveness necessary and how often you get pinged will vary by role. I’m guessing for most Ops roles, a day or two response time is great. For some, you’ll need to generally respond within the same working day(i.e. within minutes or hours). Whether necessary or not, I think achieving this is a huge asset to any team (assuming your other work doesn’t suffer and you’re prioritising well). It means you’re: 1) quickly unblocking others; and, 2) relieving the mental load on the message-sender of tracking their own request. As a note on mental load, over-communication is almost always best in Ops roles. You might open a message and think, “I can’t get to this until tomorrow”—it’s useful to train in the habit of saying that rather than just making a note to yourself. Your coworkers will then be relieved of tracking this (though crucially, it’s important to meet the timeline you set or communicate changes). In an ideal world, your co-workers are never tracking the tasks/requests they send because you’re handling that (i.e. responding quickly or providing timelines and updates automatically).
80,000 Hours article: https://80000hours.org/articles/operations-management/#how-to-assess-fit
So true! When I read the 80k article, it looks like I’d fit well with ops, but these are two important executive function traits that make me pretty bad at a lot of ops work. I’m great at long-term system organization/evaluation projects (hence a lot of my past ops work on databases), but day-to-day fireman stuff is awful for me.