Content vs. Process Insights

Generating Insights

We as humans naturally avoid what is hard. We prefer the easy path. But why? We know that the best things in life, like our kids, marriages, and triumphs over personal struggles, are often the hardest.

This familiar phenomenon tempts managers to pursue the low hanging fruit in their teams. But successful managers within Trilogy consistently go through the pain to generate Content insights.

There are two basic types of insights: Content and Process. Content insights are valuable, difficult to generate, and directly improve the team’s output quality of their fundamental function.

Process insights are less valuable, easy to produce, and impact ancillary activities.

After reading this article, you will know how to move past shallow insights and consistently improve your team with Content insights.

Not all insights are created equal

Like everything in WSPro, there exists a stack rank when it comes to insights. Some insights are pure gold while others are useless pebbles which don’t even deserve being mentioned.

WSPro certified managers are like gold panners. They carefully inspect their team’s work as they sift through what ordinary managers consider beneath them.

But their expert eye spots the golden nuggets and extracts them to create value.

Long Term Success Requires Depth

Your ability to graduate RemoteU and be successful at Trilogy in the long run are predicated on your ability to consistently generate Content insights.

When new managers take over a team, the low hanging fruit always presents itself as an enticing opportunity. New managers often make big gains just by picking off the low hanging fruit. But here’s the problem: the low hanging fruit eventually runs dry.

The difference between Content and Process insights is like cleaning your kitchen. If you quickly shove everything into the cabinets, you can make your kitchen look dashingly clean. But eventually, the things you stuffed in the cabinets will cause problems. Generating Content Insights is the hard work of putting everything where it belongs.

Managers who have not trained themselves to generate Content insights become flummoxed by the challenge and eventually are let go. But for the manager who consistently generates the hard but valuable insights, a never ending playground awaits.

Content vs. Process

Content insights: insights that directly impact the output quality of the team's fundamental function. Content insights are valuable and hard to produce. When you find a content insight it should be easy to tie it back directly to customer value. To find out the fundamental function of a team refer to the R2 spec.

Process insights: insights which improve backlog management, unit assignment, self reviews, time management, or team process. Process insights are less valuable and easy to generate.

Examples

1. If you find an insight that will increases IQB FTAR by 20% that's great - but is it actually going to make your clients happier? Is that 20% just from useless process quality bar items, like filling in certain fields?

2. Customer Support: For example in a customer support team room, if you find an insight that can streamline internal communication between L1 and L2 that's a great process insight. If you find a way to increase the quality of our knowledge base and with that decrease the back and forth communication between the client and our agent, that's an awesome content insight, because it will directly effect the quality of our service. Our clients will be happier to get a better solution faster.

3. Product Chief Architects: The goal of the PCA team room is to have the product up and running at all times. They have to ensure bugfree releases , on time. The best way to generate content insights is to do deep dives on actual customer defects. If you find a defect that was caused by bad e2e test coverage and you come up with a way to update our e2e templates to secure better coverage, that's a content insight.

First Principles of Content Insights

1.Content insights address the team’s fundamental function

Every team in Trilogy has a sole fundamental function. Support teams solve customer problems. Engineering teams write code. Sales teams make calls.

Each team does other activities as well, but their core value is derived from this fundamental function. Content insights exclusively impact the fundamental function.

As you categorize your insights, it will help to take a step back and start from the 30,000 foot level. Ask yourself “what is the base unit my team produces?” "what does my client want?"

If you are struggling to generate Content insights, re-read the chapter on Deep Dives. Similar to Deep Dives, you need to drill past the surface level insights until you hit the core.

2. Content insights are unique to your team

Since Content insights impact your team’s fundamental function, they can only apply to your team.

Ask yourself: “Could another team benefit from a similar insight?” A ‘yes’ tells you this is not a Content insight and a ‘no’ confirms you are on the right path.

A support manager who learns their team’s top performer grooms his/her backlog for increased productivity, may be tempted to consider this a Content insight.

But it is a Process insight because a development team could benefit from the same idea.

3. Content insights are found with expertise

Within the WSPro paradigm, managers are better at doing the work than their individual contributors.

If an elite manager were to swap places with a Level 1 support agent for a week, customers would receive higher quality solutions faster.

This superior knowledge needs to be the foundation of Content insights. Ask yourself: “Did your domain expertise allow you to generate this insight, or, could a non-expert have generated it?”

A ‘yes’ to this question confirms you are dealing with a Content insight.

Imagine you manage a support team. Customers come to you with problems and your unit is the number of solved problems. Let’s say you learn the following insight from your top performer.

Grouping tickets by problem type allows agents to more efficiently resolve customer issues. Agents can solve 26% more tickets if they spend 30 minutes grouping their tickets and solving them in batches.

Is this a content or process insight?

Since this insight does not directly relate to a support agent building a solution for a customer, it is a process insight. Here is an example of a Content insight from the same team.

Whenever the Level 1 support agents receive a ticket from a customer requesting to change admins, they escalate the request to a Level 2 agent. It is trivial to change admins on the back end so I have trained the L1 agents how to solve these requests. This decreases resolution time on these tickets from 30 hours to 4 hours and will increase productivity by 11%.

This insight directly addresses how L1 agents solve customer problems and is therefore a content insight.

Content insights are generated when managers look at the work of their team and say: “here is a better way to solve that problem.”

Note: We are being critical of Process insights but remember, they are not bad. You should generate Process insights and improve your team with them, but a truly Elite WSPro manager can do both Content and Process and as Process insights are easier to find, in the Written exam you'll have to show at least 2 of your best Content insights..

Here is a high level categorization of a typical team’s workflow and the standard insights managers often generate. As you begin to sift through your insights, you’ll notice that process insights come easy.