The 3 Levels of Ops Maturity
Ops teams fix problems from intuition, from experience, or from the customer's gaps, and the third is the one worth reaching.
Human truth
Teams think they're solving problems when they're mostly reacting to a feeling inside the building, or copying what worked at someone's last job.
The parts
Level 1: Intuition
Someone inside the company says something is wrong, and the admin changes something. A sales rep says "Salesforce isn't working," and the operator fixes the page layout. Fast, responsive, and a guess.
Level 2: Experience
You hire someone from the outside who has done it before. They come in and say "this is how we did it there," and set things up the same way. Real expertise, from a different company with different customers.
Level 3: Customer gaps
The revenue operations team analyzes where the gaps are in the buying experience, and the work goes there. This is where gap-first thinking lives.
When to reach for it
You're deciding how to fix your ops: patch it in-house, or hire someone who's done it before. Or the same fixes keep shipping and nothing a customer would notice gets better.
The essay
Y
ou can tell how mature an ops team is by watching how it fixes a problem.
At the first level, it runs on intuition. A sales rep walks up to the Salesforce admin and says, "Hey, something's wrong. Salesforce isn't working." The admin decides to fix the page layout. Somebody felt a problem, somebody changed something, and nobody checked whether the change touched the real issue. It feels responsive. It's a guess with a ticket number.
At the second level, it runs on experience. The company hires someone from the outside who has done this before. They come in and say, "This is how we did it there," and set things up the same way. Sometimes they say, "We need to restructure the sales team." Experience is worth a lot. But it's experience of another company, with other customers and another product, copied over whole.
At the third level, it runs on the customer. The revenue operations team analyzes where the gaps are in the buying experience, and the work goes where the gaps are. That's the level we pushed teams toward at Go Nimbly, and it's where gap-first thinking comes from.
The levels aren't a grade on the people. The admin at level one is often very good at the job. The expert at level two usually knows their stuff. What changes from level to level is where the signal comes from. A feeling inside the building. A memory from a different building. Or the customer.
So moving up a level is less about who you hire and more about which question you ask before the work starts. At level one it's "who's upset?" At level two it's "what worked last time?" At level three it's "what is the customer running into?"
Every team starts at the first level. Nobody should stay there. The way up is to check each request against the buying experience before you build it, and to be honest when the answer is that no customer would ever notice. ■
Where it came from
The three levels are Jason's model, taught as Go Nimbly's RevOps maturity model in talks and podcasts from 2020 onward, including "The 3 Levels of Revenue Operations Maturity" talk. It is the companion to gap-first thinking: level three is gap-first thinking in practice.