My Stint with Raptors Co.
Alright, so you wanna know about my time with Raptors Co.? Man, where do I even begin? It wasn’t a long gig, but it sure felt like it sometimes. I got brought in because things were, let’s say, a bit wild on their operations side. Good people, super smart, but their internal processes were like a tangled ball of yarn after a cat’s had its way with it.
First impressions, you know? I walked in, and they were all about speed. “Move fast, break things” – classic startup mantra. Except they were breaking more than they were making, process-wise. Their project tracking? A mix of spreadsheets that only one person understood, sticky notes that probably violated some fire codes, and a whole lot of “Oh, I thought you were doing that.”
So, my job was to try and bring some order to the chaos. Not turn them into some rigid corporate machine, no, but just get things flowing a bit smoother. I figured, okay, let’s start simple. A unified platform, some basic workflows. Sounds easy, right?
The Plan vs. Reality
I spent the first week just observing. Sat in on meetings, talked to everyone I could. Tried to map out how things actually got done, not how they thought they got done. Big difference, let me tell you. They had this one system they’d cobbled together for client communication. It was… unique. Built on top of something ancient, patched with duct tape and hope. Any new system had to somehow talk to this beast, or it was a no-go.
My initial thought was to introduce something off-the-shelf. There are tons of great tools out there. I picked one, did a little demo, showed them how it could simplify things. Some folks were excited. Others? Not so much. “Too complex,” “That’s not how we do things,” “But I like my spreadsheet.” You get the picture. The resistance wasn’t malicious, just… habit. And fear of the unknown, I guess.
Here’s what I ended up doing:
- Started small. Instead of a full overhaul, I picked one specific pain point: how they tracked feature requests. It was a black hole.
- Simplified the tool. The off-the-shelf thing I picked? I stripped it down to its bare essentials. Hid all the fancy features they didn’t need right away. Made it look less scary.
- Manual bridging. That ancient client system? Yeah, there was no clean API. For a while, it meant some manual data transfer. Not ideal, but better than nothing. I documented that process like crazy.
- Found champions. In every team, there’s usually one or two people more open to change. I focused on them. Got them using the new way, and they started showing others. Way more effective than me preaching.
It was slow going. Lots of “Can it do this?” and “What about that?” I spent a lot of time just listening and tweaking. One day, I remember we had a critical request come in. Before, it would have been a fire drill, emails flying, people shouting. This time, it went into the new system, got assigned, tracked, and resolved. Someone actually said, “Hey, that was… easier.” That was a good day.
The biggest takeaway for me? You can’t just throw technology at a problem, especially a people problem. Raptors Co. wasn’t disorganized because they lacked tools. They were disorganized because their growth outpaced their ability to create shared habits. My job became less about implementing software and more about facilitating conversations and building tiny new habits, one step at a time.
By the time I left, things weren’t perfect. Far from it. But they had a foundation. They were talking the same language, at least for some things. And that ancient system? Well, it was still there, but there was a plan, a roadmap, to eventually phase it out. That’s a win in my book. It’s all about those small wins, you know?
