Getting Stuff Done: how we leveraged the entire team to overcome tasks
On the 15th of October 2021, our entire team came together for our GSD (get stuff done) day. Do you ever feel like you have an insurmountable task in front of you? Well, enter the GSD day. We knew that we had a very big job ahead of us, something that would have taken the Customer Success team months to finish. So we thought to ourselves, ‘why not get the whole team on board and make a day of it.’ We leveraged the entire team and overcame our mammoth task in a fraction of the time.
The task at hand? Creating a repository of guides explaining all 70 of our integrations.
What’s an integration?
Our integrations are core to what we do at Tenzo. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to get your data into our platform. Previously, we didn’t have an efficient system when it came to cataloguing what one integration could or couldn’t do and we couldn’t share that information easily with customers and prospects.
This is about to get quite technical but bear with me for a second. Each of our integrations is either done by API, SFTP transfer or agent and the information we can obtain differs depending on the data source (Lightspeed vs TISSL vs Tevalis, for example).
While one might give us discount information for every sale, another might not. Or the level of granularity might differ from system to system. Therefore, it’s extremely important that everyone is on the same page as to what we can provide based on the data source when we speak to people who are interested in setting up Tenzo.
An extremely important factor for us is that we normalise this data so that no matter the number of different data sources we can show you the information side-by-side giving you insights and accurate forecasts. Therefore our understanding of each integration is extremely important.
It had become obvious that we needed a dedicated space and system to do this.
A team challenge
As a further benefit, while being a small group, most of the Tenzo team never get to work directly with anyone other than those in their function. So, we decided to pair up team members who don’t get to work together often to tackle the challenge together, giving us all a chance to work with someone new and increase cross-functional collaboration.
This involved pairing tech team members with growth team members as we needed at least one person in each pair to understand the technical elements involved in the integrations. It forced us all to work outside of our comfort zone and taught us all more about the inner workings of the Tenzo platform.
“Our GSD day was a great way to bring Tenzonians together and work together on a common goal. I would recommend it to any company that wants to build team cross-collaboration and tackle a large project.” Christian Mouysset, CEO.
What were the outcomes?
An example of one of our guides
We have now reviewed and updated over 60 internal guides and published over 35 of them to our Help Center. We will soon have all of the guides available externally.
Just having the internal guides has been invaluable, though. Often our sales and marketing teams have questions about whether certain integration can support one feature or another. Previously, these teams would have to seek out someone with expertise in that particular integration and would have required asking multiple people. Now they have the answers at their fingertips making us all more productive and knowledgeable.
What did we learn?
We learnt that the pairings have to be well thought through – experienced developers needed to be paired with team members who had little technical experience as otherwise, it was the blind leading the blind.
The day’s schedule needs to be set up far in advance to make sure everyone will be free. It’s also good to have a strict cut off point – we scheduled 3 hours which was about right. Any more and it would have been overwhelming to the team and would have taken away too much time from their usual work.
We also found that while the exercise significantly shortened the amount of time the CS would have spent on it, it didn’t exclude all follow-up work. We still needed to double-check that the information was correct and stress test the guides, making them intelligible to anyone no matter their technical background.
Where can I see these guides?
You can find them in our Help Center under Integration Guides.
Does the ‘S’ in ‘GSD’ really stand for Stuff?
No.
