Context
As Operations Manager for the Learning Design team, I was responsible for day-to-day operational supervision: traffic management, prioritization, delegation, capacity planning, and ensuring courses launched on time at acceptable quality. I led a team of learning designers (3 senior, 2 intermediate, 1 junior), managed a freelance QC group, and coordinated closely with Delivery, Engineering, Support, Sales, and Content teams.
Problems
- 1Ownership was unclear, documentation was minimal, and decision-making was avoided because people feared consequences
- 2Work arrived as a constant stream of urgent interruptions—only P0 fires got addressed while P2s accumulated
- 3Work was tracked via Basecamp plus inconsistent spreadsheets, making it impossible to see true workload or dependencies
- 4'On-time' often meant 'published at the last minute,' creating a loop of rushed content, errors, and reactive fixes
Constraints
Scaling organization with legacy tooling that couldn't support visibility needs
Cross-functional dependencies with engineering, delivery, and support teams
Monthly cohort launches requiring consistent delivery cadence
Cultural resistance to tooling changes ('what worked before')
My Approach
Key Interventions
Asana Migration & Enterprise Rollout
Moved the Learning Design team to Asana as the primary operating system, then expanded to Delivery and Engineering.
Create a single source of truth showing every committed deliverable, real stage of each lesson, and team capacity.
Once the Learning Design model was stable, other departments began adopting the approach after seeing operational clarity and throughput gains.
Traffic Management & Intake Control
Trained the team to route all requests through me for triage, prioritization, and scheduling instead of allowing direct interruptions.
Designers were being derailed mid-task by other departments bypassing operations.
Designers stayed in flow, priorities became defensible, and cross-functional friction dropped significantly.
Stage-Gate Production Pipeline
Created a 'measure twice, cut once' production pipeline with staged workflow: drafting → TQS review → LD updates → QC pass → final checks → publish → platform push.
Quality needed to become repeatable, not heroic. Ambiguity about what 'done' meant at each stage caused rework.
Removed ambiguity, made blockers visible early rather than at deadline, and reduced avoidable errors.
Automated Student Feedback Loop
Automated Zendesk ticket creation into Asana with metadata for categorization, enabling faster triage and cleaner routing.
Previously, feedback was manually captured weekly, introducing errors and delaying response.
Near real-time student feedback became actionable, improving responsiveness and reducing escalations.
Operational Hygiene & Storage Restructure
Reorganized Google Drive into a taxonomy aligned to projects, courses, and partners; introduced naming conventions and ownership expectations.
Documentation was scattered, causing confusion about where content belonged across overlapping product lines.
Clearer ownership, reduced accidental drift, and maintained lesson metadata matrix for product line clarity.
External QC Network with SLAs
Established a QC network with 48-hour turnaround expectations and sample-based oversight for quality assurance.
Internal review capacity was insufficient for the volume of content being produced.
Prevented last-minute publishing by enforcing review gates, reducing reactive work downstream.
Results
- ✓98% on-time delivery through capacity planning and phased rollout practices
- ✓Meeting time dropped by 33% once work was visible and status reporting moved to dashboards
- ✓Student complaints fell by 12% while course NPS increased by 20%
- ✓Cyber Security bootcamp overhaul sustained ~70% NPS vs typical low-50s baseline
- ✓Organizational pull: Delivery and Engineering moved off Basecamp onto Asana after seeing results
Reference
Simon was hired into the role of Operations Manager because there was a need in the Learning Experience team for more structured project planning, project management, and traffic management.
This need arose as a direct result of the business's expansion of its learning product portfolio. It was also indirectly motivated by a need for a more manageable span of control in the business's biggest team. People management would remain with me and the middle managers, but some part of this functional supervision, as it relates to the day-to-day operations of the Learning Design team, would be delegated to the Operations Manager.
Soon after he started, it quickly became apparent to me that, aside from being highly effective at the functional aspect of his role, Simon was also a budding leader in the team, someone that his peers and cross-functional collaborators continue to respect and admire. In this capacity, Simon and I often had discussions about how individual team members were faring, whether they were able to meet their project deliverables consistently, and whether they needed support in one way or another to perform optimally. He gave me the pulse of the team, which helped to inform how team culture was shaped, team morale was boosted, and individual team members were managed.
I have no hesitation in describing Simon as a star performer. He is someone who cares deeply for HyperionDev's students and its staff, and his role actually revolves around bringing stability to operations.