How do you run operations when your company’s still figuring things out?
by•
No ERP. No full-time ops lead. No perfect processes.
Just Notion docs, Google Sheets, Slack chaos… and a growing to-do list.
You’re hiring. Selling. Delivering. Building.
And somewhere in between — trying to make it all work.
So here’s a real question for the early teams:
🧩 What does your internal chaos look like right now?
🛠️ What small fixes actually helped?
🤯 What’s one thing that should be simple… but never is?
Drop your stories below. What’s working? What’s still a mess?👇
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Replies
IXORD
I don't see any other options here than just continuing to work, these problems that are coming to the teams should be adaptive for the company. What do you think?
@ixord Sure, they may differ. But if you continue to do nothing, wouldn't it lead to more complicated ones?
IXORD
@yanakuodis The product cannot be perfect, you can make it good and nothing more. And if you do nothing, it means that the product will stop at a certain stage and will not move up.
Oh man — this hits hard 😂
Right now it’s a mix of Notion dashboards pretending to be a CRM, Slack threads we swear we’ll organize later, and Google Sheets duct-taped across 3 workflows.
One small fix that helped: Setting up a simple “Monday kickoff” doc to align on priorities + blockers. 10 mins, async, and it actually sticks.
One thing that should be simple but isn’t: Getting consistent naming across tools. Is it “Client,” “Customer,” or “User”? Depends on the doc 😅
Still a hot mess, but we’re getting there.
@dustinheaps Thanks for sharing! You're definitely on the way 🤗
TinyCommand
Totally relate early-stage ops are part improv, part archaeology.
What our chaos looked like:
Multiple Notion docs with overlapping info, Google Sheets branching like family trees, and Slack threads that held critical decisions... for a day.
What actually helped:
We started maintaining a single Notion “source of truth” doc per function with a last updated date and doc owner. Also, adding simple status tags in Sheets (like “WIP”, “Needs Input”, “Final”) helped reduce constant back-and-forth.
One thing that should be simple but isn’t:
Tracking why a decision was made. We’ve now added a “decision log” section inside each Notion page nothing fancy, just one line per major call.
Still messy, but at least now the chaos has headers and timestamps.