Operational Scalability: Shannon Donohue of Telesign On How to Set Up Systems, Procedures, And People to Prepare a Business to Scale
Build a culture of continuous improvement. Publicly praise when bottlenecks have been properly identified and alleviated, and more importantly, highlight how those bottlenecks were able to be identified and how this effort improved peoples’ working conditions. Conversely, be candid about lessons learned from failure. People can only dare greatly if they are given the latitude to be brave, which inevitably means failing at times.
In today’s fast-paced business environment, scalability is not just a buzzword; it’s a necessity. Entrepreneurs often get trapped in the daily grind of running their businesses, neglecting to put in place the systems, procedures, and people needed for sustainable growth. Without this foundation, companies hit bottlenecks, suffer inefficiencies, and face the risk of stalling or failing. This series aims to delve deep into the intricacies of operational scalability. How do you set up a framework that can adapt to growing customer demands? What are the crucial procedures that can streamline business operations? How do you build a team that can take on increasing responsibilities while maintaining a high standard of performance?
In this interview series, we are talking to CEOs, Founders, Operations Managers Consultants, Academics, Tech leaders & HR professionals, who share lessons from their experience about “How To Set Up Systems, Procedures, And People To Prepare A Business To Scale”. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Shannon Donohue.
As a Santa Monica native, Shannon Donohue joined the Messaging industry in 2011 just before graduating from UCLA. For the past 13 years, she has focused her career on messaging operations, carrier relations, industry advocacy, and legal and regulatory compliance. As we spend a third of our lives at work, her passion is to create an environment where people find meaning in their daily jobs by connecting individual contributions to both personal and larger organizational goals.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I was fortunate to land a job at a start-up straight out of college after interning there in my Senior year. The benefit of being an early employee at a start-up is that your role is usually shaped around your skill set, and I naturally gravitated towards the logical work of Operations. Over my nearly 12 years with the company, I had the privilege of working in nearly every department, eventually bootstrapping the Messaging Operations & Global Connectivity teams, expanding the scope from merely reactionary triage to proactive monitoring and building truly automated systems designed for lean scalability.
I joined Telesign nearly two years ago, building on the experience of having bootstrapped a lean yet scalable department, to instill industry best practices and build a culture of continuous improvement through investment in lightweight automations.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
One of the greatest Operations leaders I’ve reported to bought a box of chocolates the first time any engineer made a production change that caused an outage. This was such a beautiful way to show grace during a tense situation and emphasize that we learn through failure. If memory serves, I earned my box of chocolates making a swagger change to a configuration file that caused temporary failures for a few minutes before being reverted. From that masterclass, I realized that in the right culture, being brave is celebrated, but also to have two sets of eyes on any production change before hitting the button.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Telesign provides Continuous Trust to leading global enterprises by connecting, protecting, and defending their digital identities. Our solutions provide fraud protection and secure communications to make the digital world a safer place and help companies and customers engage with confidence. With powerful machine learning and extensive data science we deliver identity risk recommendations with a unique combination of speed, accuracy, and global reach.
As part of our offering, Telesign delivers those one-time passwords that people have come to expect from many of the world’s largest brands to protect their interactions. The Messaging Operations team responsible for ensuring the timely and cost-effective delivery of those messages reports to me.
A recent event stands out where a customer was able to leverage Telesign’s Digital Identity product suite to identify a fraudulent event of artificial traffic pumping through a low friction sign-up page. Fraudsters are constantly looking for ways to extract value from brands, and through the combination of our Intelligence and CPaaS offering, Telesign’s customers can detect and prevent value extraction by nefarious actors targeting their brand and their customers.
You are a successful business leader. Which three-character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
The two core values I rely on are Respect and Growth. Respect is a basic human right, and by striving to exist alongside people instead of within a hierarchy, we open ourselves. Early in my career, someone told me that everyone has something to teach you, you just have to be willing to listen and learn. This has always served me well, even when working with challenging personalities who do not share my view on basic human rights of respect.
Another lesson that has served me well is that friction can move us forward. It took time for my younger self to realize that the uncomfortable feeling you get when disagreeing is a clue that you are learning. Slowing down and managing yourself in challenging situations is a key to success. Ultimately, challenge sharpens the human spirit. Without challenge, we grow dull and complacent. I now welcome challenge and healthy disagreement, as it makes me a more well-rounded leader.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about Operational Scalability. In order to make sure that we are all on the same page, let’s begin with a simple definition. What does Operational Scalability mean to you?
Operational Scalability for me is the ability to grow or decrease the volume of business your organization processes without having to proportionally scale the team delivering the services. It’s about how well a company can handle growth or contraction without compromising performance, quality, or cost-effectiveness.
Which types of business can most benefit from investing in Operational Scalability?
I may have a myopic view in that I’ve traditionally worked for SaaS companies, but every industry that is focused on providing a service or good at scale can benefit from investing in operational scalability. I recall examples from early literature I read on the topic highlighting the accomplishments of the Japanese car manufacturing industry, practicing continuous improvement by observing the flow of work, breaking the flow into smaller chunks, then visualizing bottlenecks and finding creative solutions to increase capacity.
Why is it so important for a business to invest time, energy, and resources into Operational Scalability?
If you don’t build operational scalability into your foundation, you’ll find yourself with a mountain of technical debt when the business starts expecting increased throughput. Work always flows in one direction. It’s imperative to create, shorten, and amplify feedback loops when designing your operations. By building this muscle early, you will set yourself up for success to identify scaling challenges quicker, improve how you deliver your products and services, and accelerate resolution times when operational work invariably creates bottlenecks in delivery to customers.
In contrast, what happens to a business that does not invest time, energy, and resources into Operational Scalability?
Simply put, superhuman efforts don’t scale. Some teams get by on sheer determination, grit, and discretionary time of key resources. This is a recipe for burnout. If you are interested in practicing operational scalability but don’t know where to start, I highly recommend The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim. This book has been a guiding force any time I inherit a team that didn’t build operational scalability into their processes from the start.
Can you please share a story from your experience about how a business grew dramatically when they worked on their Operational Scalability?
At my last organization, we engaged in M&A with a similar company in the industry. We knew the potential for this business to grow was immense, so we invested early in lightweight automation for some of the operational procedures we anticipated would create bottlenecks. Thanks to this early planning and the diligence to invest in a problem that didn’t yet exist, we were able to scale the business 25x in revenue while only increasing the team 2x. Those numbers speak for themselves and exemplify the success a business can have when investing early in scalability.
Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the “Five Most Important Things A Business Leader Should Do to Set Up Systems, Procedures, And People to Prepare a Business to Scale”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
- Observe the flow of work, where it comes from, how it’s processed, and what is ultimately delivered to the customer.
- Track work in smaller increments and visualize the flow of work. If work is tracked in tickets, make sure each task takes an equal amount of time. If you find people assigning work through email or Slack, direct them to make a ticket. You can’t track velocity if you’re not properly tracking units of work.
- Track work-in-progress (WIP) to identify your bottlenecks. As workloads increase on a resource, the wait time goes up. Once a resource is 90% utilized, wait time increases exponentially. Resources can be people, processes, or steps required to deliver a good or service (like QA).
- Create short and succinct feedback loops that require a low level of effort, so they become common practice. In doing so, you will further identify what needs to be improved about your bottlenecks to increase throughput.
- Build a culture of continuous improvement. Publicly praise when bottlenecks have been properly identified and alleviated, and more importantly, highlight how those bottlenecks were able to be identified and how this effort improved peoples’ working conditions. Conversely, be candid about lessons learned from failure. People can only dare greatly if they are given the latitude to be brave, which inevitably means failing at times.
What are some common misconceptions businesses have about scaling? Can you please explain?
One of the largest misconceptions I’ve seen is the “we’ll get to that later” approach. Problems are less costly to resolve early in the design phase. If you see something that can be improved, investing time to get it right early will reduce the risk of costly re-work or entire refactoring of value-delivery systems in the future.
How do you keep your team motivated during periods of rapid growth or change?
We spend half of our waking lives at work. If your work life is stressful, the rest of your life suffers from it. My guiding principle as a leader is to ensure people find purpose and meaning in their work. This takes time and patience to truly reflect and tie every single individual’s contribution back to our departmental goals, drawing a direct correlation to the company’s growth objectives. Feeling as though you have a place to grow, dare, and enjoy your work is the most important tenant for me. I find this is important in times of stability and in times of rapid growth, uncertainty, or change.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Discomfort is a clue that you should pay attention. I talked a bit about how friction moves us forward, and in those instances, the most crucial skill is how you manage yourself and how you show up. This is relevant to me because like many individuals, I dislike discomfort. I naturally shy away from it. It takes a sincere effort to make space for the discomfort and commit to navigating through it to the best possible outcome.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I’d start the 20% movement. I’ve long had this idea that if I could ask for one wish from a magic genie, it would be to make everyone’s life on this planet 20% easier. We live in a society based on dualism. We can’t have enjoyment without despair, and we can’t recognize ease without challenge. But if you could aim to make everyone’s life around you just 20% better, then you’ve left a lasting legacy. When I close my eyes and envision what I want to be remembered for, I see the visual of a ripple effect created when throwing a stone into water. Just like the ripples, conveying constant outward support and ease to those around you is the best movement I could hope to spread.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
Operational Scalability: Shannon Donohue of Telesign On How to Set Up Systems, Procedures, And… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.