Picture rapid growth like the perfect bowl of homemade guacamole. For two people, all it takes is a couple of avocados, half an onion, a handful of cilantro, one tomato, a jalapeño pepper, lime juice and a pinch of sea salt.
Now, take the same recipe, and scale it to feed a Super Bowl party of 20 guests. The ingredients aren’t going to change, but the recipe will, and it’s not as simple as multiplying each ingredient by 10. Maybe the abundance of avocados requires more salt than anticipated. Perhaps adding 10 jalapeños makes the dip too spicy.
Scaling isn’t a perfect science — more often, it’s trial and error. And that same sentiment is true in the tech world.
Just ask Red Ventures. Recently, the relationship management team scaled from a one-person show to three, an exciting shift that required plenty of planning and back-and-forth communication.
“And even with that communication, it still resulted in a jumble of excel spreadsheets,” Quinn Tomlin, the public relations manager for higher education at Red Ventures, said.
And that’s OK, Tomlin said. Because with rapid growth comes a swath of new priorities, like onboarding, training, organization, and reassessing internal processes. Failing is a part of the journey and leads to “aha moments,” which will prepare teams for the next phase of growth down the line.
Built In Seattle sat down with Tomlin to learn more about Red Ventures’ recent growth and some of the lessons she learned about scale along the way.
Tell us a bit about the team that scaled and your role on it.
At Red Ventures Education, we put the student first in everything we do and that starts with our website content. Whether it’s a college planning guide, blog post or career overview, we want our content to be something our users value and trust to help them make their education decisions. As we’re always looking to improve, so we began testing subject-matter expert reviews on one of our websites, NurseJournal.org, in the fall of 2020.
After just a few months of reviews, the team saw a positive increase in the quality and authority of our content. Now, prospective nursing students can use our college planning resources with the confidence that an actual nursing professional has reviewed the page for accuracy. We quickly realized that all of our users deserved this level of trust in our content. In March 2021, I was brought in as the manager for our relationship management team and freelance content review network. I was tasked with scaling the program to meet our growing content needs across all 16 of our sites.
What was the process of scaling like and how long did it take? Were there any hiccups or “aha moments?”
We scaled the relationship management team from one person (who oversaw a network of eight reviewers, all serving one domain) to three people (who oversaw 22 reviewers and served 16 domains) in just four months.
We started slowly, expanding to one domain at a time over the first two months. This added some hiccups, because each domain’s content process was slightly different, which made standardizing the review request process difficult.
Our biggest “aha moment” came when we reached out to other Red Ventures’ businesses to learn how they solved similar issues. We discovered that we could adapt an internal content management system, used by another team, to handle review requests at scale. This streamlined and standardized the process for all of our different content teams, and cut down the time we spent manually assigning and managing reviews, allowing us to process them faster.
It took us about a month to get the product in place, but once we did, our team really took off. We were able to open reviews to all of our remaining domains, and now had time to focus on recruiting more reviewers and onboard our third team member.
Our biggest ‘aha moment’ came when we reached out to other Red Ventures’ businesses to learn how they solved similar issues.’’
What’s the most exciting project the team will be taking on in the next few months?
Recruiting reviewers is probably the best part of the job because you get to seek out and meet individuals from diverse professions and areas of expertise, ranging from college admissions to bootcamps to MBAs to nurse practitioners. Our goal is to have 50 active network members by the end of the year. To do so, the next few months are dedicated to working hard with our content leads to evaluate who else we need to bring into the network to ensure we can cover all areas of education.
What they do: Through content and personalized digital experiences, Red Ventures’ platform builds online journeys that make it easier for people to make important decisions about their homes, health, travel, finances, education and entertainment.
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