New Strategies for a High-Growth Team
SUMMARY
The Fraud ML team within a massive telecommunications company had been successful to the point of outpacing themselves – rapid growth called for change.
The lead executive, like her team, was stretched thin and didn’t know where to begin on a new path forward.
The challenge for Hop was to gain a clear understanding of existing bottlenecks and tensions, and build consensus across a large number of stakeholders on a strategy to resolve them.
This engagement allowed our client to evolve the strategy for her team to increase efficiency, reduce potential points of failure, and steer away from burnout toward continued success.
THE COMPANY
Our client is a well-known Fortune 10 multinational telecommunications company. With a robust Fraud ML team that has been tremendously impactful within the organization, our client had experienced rapid growth as a result of their success, and their processes and platform hadn’t kept up. The lead executive of the team engaged Hop to advise on the best path forward – it was obvious that something needed to change, but what exactly? And where to begin?
THE CHALLENGE
As sometimes happens with successful ML teams, rapid growth had resulted in our client’s team members being stretched thin. There were many single points of failure, and models were not getting into production quickly enough to demonstrate the ROI of the investment in hiring. Minor updates were taking months, knowledge was siloed, and the engineering teams were burned out. Everyone was doing good work, but organizationally there was friction, both for those doing the work and for those consuming it. Our primary challenge was to figure out a strategy for accelerating the velocity of this team.
Implementing any strategy successfully depended upon consensus within our client’s organization, amongst many different perspectives at all levels on problems and solutions. Gaining an understanding of all of these individual views from such a large and busy team presented a challenge in itself; creating collaboration and alignment was the next hurdle.
“This was exactly what I needed. I knew I needed to do something but had no idea where to begin. It was really helpful to reflect and identify what problems were most important to address first.”
THE APPROACH
Our approach for increasing a team’s velocity begins with studying the lifecycle of models and data. How does this team go from research idea to impact? Who do they need to convince, how do they set up experiments, and what data and compute resources are needed? How do they drive results towards becoming a functioning part of the ecosystem? Answering such questions for models that had come to production, as well as those being refreshed or extended, illuminated the end-to-end processes for this team. From that standpoint, sources of friction became more apparent.
Before solving any problems that had been surfaced, it was important to review findings with all stakeholders to create alignment. Data scientists came to see more clearly downstream issues, engineers realized where their workflow created a bottleneck, and management gained a better understanding of where investment could have the greatest ROI.
Our next step was to design solutions with the relevant stakeholders. What we often find is that once there’s alignment on high-priority friction points and why they’re important to an organization’s overall effectiveness, solutions move along more quickly. People bring their own expertise and creativity to smooth the path toward the ultimate vision, making tweaks along the way to accelerate the timeline. In our client’s case, one example of this showed up in an opportunity to repurpose an existing cost-cutting effort by the cloud infrastructure team to support machinery for the data scientists – a minor extra effort that wouldn’t have been possible without larger awareness of a common goal.
THE RESULTS
It can be difficult to step back and reflect on strategy and a larger focus when you’re leading a fast-growing, high-impact team. This engagement gave our client the space to do this. The original strategy that had spurred rapid growth was now outdated – we helped our client to rearticulate the strategy in the context of the larger team, allowing for more efficient and comprehensive teamwork. The reorganization of subteams into larger groups with multiple leads also reduced potential points of failure.
The ultimate result of our work was the alignment around a path away from pain and burnout for a large team with great potential, reinvigorating and empowering them in their work and the future impact they’ll have in the organization.
Need a new strategy for your high-growth team? Contact us to learn how Hop can help.