Enough with “quick wins”
The 4 tiers of getting things done across teams
Can’t you picture walking up to a big ole apple tree, and one of the branches is sagging down because it’s just that full of apples, and you pick the plumpest, juiciest one you can see, and somehow there’s also delicious organic peanut butter right there to go with it?
In theory, I love low-hanging fruit. I love the idea of quick wins, but all too often what people call a quick win winds up not being very quick at all (and there’s never any peanut butter).
A “quick win” project is proposed, and a small team starts working on it. One week in, another team gets wind of the project — turns out it overlaps with their stuff. You decide to team up with them. A week after that an exec asks “hey what’s going on with [project]” and wants to review the work. Turns out the message is wrong, or the direction is slightly off, and that was fine when the work was just 4 people in a room, but now that it’s bigger why don’t you really make it big.
And oops! We’re two months in and no work has shipped.
I find that there are three types of “quick” wins:
Actually quick wins! The rarest, because someone has already done them.
Simple wins that feel quick because they’re simple. For example, “we could update all of our apps pages with just 150 words of extra copy and organic search traffic would go up.” Simple, but at 849 apps pages you’re talking about 127,000 words. Not so quick.
Deceptively simple wins that involve multiple teams. The win feels quick because the nuts-and-bolts work itself shouldn’t take long — but the real overhead comes from communication across multiple teams with competing priorities and stakeholders.
Whenever I hear “quick” wins, I put it into one of the above categories.
A quick win that takes too long winds up feeling like a miss even if the impact is pretty good. If you thought work would ship in two weeks but it takes two months, you’ll probably be disappointed or frustrated even when it turns out ok.
I think the phrase “quick wins” pops up so frustratingly often because people struggle to accurately assess how their work overlaps with other people.
Here’s how I think of it.
4 tiers of getting what you need from other teams
Tier 1: Solo. You don’t need help. All the work that needs to get done for a project can be done solo or sits within your team. If there are incidentals that you need from other teams, they are part of existing processes (i.e. you can just put in the request).
Example: With content and SEO on the same team, I can prioritize writing 100+ pages for an online glossary. I don’t need anyone’s permission to do this.
Tier 2: Assist. You do work that you control but is intended to help another team. If they use the work, it helps them and you. Tier 2 requires work from another team, but that team should be happy to do the work because you are making something that they already do more successful.
Examples: A growth team offers to test calls to action across top-of-funnel pages of a website. An SEO team does keyword research as an assist to the writers who build help documentation.
Tier 3: Request. The other team does most of the work, and it’s work that they were not originally planning to do. You need work from another team, and that work is added to their existing to-dos. Tier 3 work requires internal selling, favors, relationships, political capital, etc.
Examples: A product marketing team asks a design team to create a series of templates that can be used in marketing campaigns. An SEO asks a PR team to restructure their campaign subfolders and microsites.
Tier 4: Project. Major, coordinated, integrated campaigns or system building. Big budgets, multiple teams are involved, executives are watching or stakeholders. Tier 4 means working across everyone and adjusting to people’s priorities. Proposing a tier 4 project isn’t for the faint-hearted, and will require executive support.
Example: An operations team wants to change lead qualification, which changes how leads are passed to sales (involves sales and marketing leadership).
Which tier are you in?
I find that a lot of misjudged “quick wins” fall into tier 3 — simple but large projects that feel quick because someone else does all the work!
I’ve also seen plenty of moments when people think a project is tier 1 or 2 and it turns out to be tier 4. I misjudged a project like that recently (it never stops completely), and have done so plenty of times so far in my career.
Not everything you do will be tier 4, nor would you want it to be. Tier 4 involves a lot of perspectives, and communicating across the group can take as much time as the work to be completed.
Not everything will be tier 3 either, which is too bad. How wonderful would it be if other people did all the work and the results rolled on in?
Tier 3 takes good relationships and internal social capital, and you want as much of those things as you can get because tier 3 work will make your life a lot easier.
One way to get them is to focus on tier 1 and 2 work. If you can get results from work that you ship solo (tier 1) or can make what someone else is doing more effective (tier 2), you can demonstrate that the work you and your team do gets results. I sometimes say “success leads to success.” People want to attach themselves to successful projects, so the best way to get help is to make sure your project is already successful when you ask.
When you think of a project, ask what tier it’s in. For tier 3 and 4, pick your shots. Choose your moments. Respect other teams’ time by proposing work when you already have a strong case for it.
Use tier 1, and especially tier 2, to build up to those moments. Find opportunities that you can run with until they become the obvious program — the work that everyone already wants to get involved with because it’s seen success.
A true “quick win” will almost always be in tier 1 or 2. If you have support from the beginning, it might be in tier 3. Probably never tier 4 though.
When you need to manage across teams and across peers in an organization, ask which tier your work is in.