Upon being promoted from individual contributor to manager of the NAM Technical Account Management team, my first order of business was to address outdated and unformalized day-to-day processes, expectations, and goals. This prior lack of formalization made it difficult to assess individuals’ performance and properly lay out expectations that would hold us accountable to fulfill our roles and responsibilities.
The solution
I conceptualized and created a series of documentation, presentation decks, and SOPs with the goal of clearly outlining expectations and day-to-day processes - such as:
Onboarding Deck - with re-defined job description, R&Rs, and expectations broken out by seniority levels (IC1, IC2, IC3, etc.)
SOP on formalized time-tracking, client SLA expectations, and incident logging protocols
JIRA Dashboards to monitor individuals’ account health statuses, MTTR stats, open cases, and MBOs
“TAM Playbook” on day-to-day processes
Mid-year and Annual Performance Review template
The result
As a result of these efforts, the Technical Account Management team had a clear direction on how to be successful in their role. Additionally:
I was able to hold individuals accountable when defined SLAs were not met or processes were not followed, leading to greater accountability across the team
Individuals had more direct access to assess the health of each of their accounts and decide where to prioritize their time, which led to less items falling through the cracks and greater attention to accounts with lower health scores
Individuals had more transparency into their weekly stats and MBO attainment progress, allowing us to assess on a weekly basis and make changes as needed to improve both metrics
Performance reviews became more standardized and defined clear areas of improvement, while acknowledging their strengths.
