Resources
— Guide · 60 minutes
Workflow mapping guide
The fastest way to clean up an operational mess is to draw it. This is the exercise we walk new teams through before they touch a single SOP.
Pick one workflow that hurts
Don't start with the most strategic workflow. Start with the one that gets re-explained in Slack every week. Onboarding, support escalation, content review — anything that has a "wait, who owns this?" moment.
Capture the steps as they really happen
- List every step in the order it actually occurs — not the order it should.
- Note who does each step (role, not name).
- Mark which steps are silent handoffs vs explicit ones.
- Flag steps where work waits more than a day.
Mark the failure points
- Steps that depend on a single person knowing the context.
- Steps where the next owner has to chase information.
- Steps you re-explain to new hires every quarter.
- Steps where customer-facing time is lost.
Tighten owners and definitions of done
Every step needs one owner and a one-line definition of done. "Reviewed" is not a definition of done. "Reviewed by editor and checked against the style guide" is.
Promote it into a living SOP
Your map becomes the spine of the SOP. Add the checklist for each step, link the templates, and assign a quarterly review owner so it stops going stale.