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Operations

Tags
Owner
Verification
@Ty Fujimura@April 26, 2023 12:00 AM (EDT) → July 25, 2023 12:00 AM (EDT)

Ops is in charge of all the “work outside the work.” This department owns the critical back-office processes that allow the studio to function and grow.

@Ty Fujimura currently acts as the primary Operations leader and works with Levy, an experienced outsourced operations firm, to handle most of the heavy lifting. Ops also includes the Wellness function, which is managed by @Rebecca Testrake.

People Ops

Ops is in charge of ensuring our team is supported, empowered, and treated well.

This starts in the hiring process. Ops supports the entire hiring lifecycle for both Core Team and Contributor roles, working hand-in-hand with the person at Cantilever who wants to make a hire. Ops owns our Contributor Recruiting Pipeline. Ops is in charge of all onboarding and offboarding.

After hiring, each person at Cantilever will have a manager if they are in the Core Team or a primary contact, if they are a Contributor. These are the first resources for any issues or concerns, but Ops is able to come in and help with any issues the manager cannot solve.

How We Hire
Employee Paperwork
Job Candidate Exercises

Finance

Ops is in charge of our finances and our books. They work with our bookkeeper and tax advisor (In the US these are both Tanner).

Accounting Guide
Invoicing Guide for PMs
Harvest Cost Rate Computations

Legal

Most paperwork Cantilever signs has to do with a client, and therefore is handled by the client strategist without involvement from Ops.

Non-client paperwork such as employee agreements are handled by Operations as a part of People Ops. Other general paperwork such as our insurance contract, real estate contracts, etc. are also handled by Operations.

Studio Management

Studio Management is the administration of the tools that we use on a daily basis to complete our work. In a physical studio this would involve setup of equipment, furniture, etc. In our remote-first model, it mainly has to do with software. We use a litany of software tools for our project work and also to administer our team. Operations owns our software tools and is in charge of:

  • Keeping them cleanly set up and in good working order
  • Adding and removing users during onboarding and off boarding and based on policy or strategic changes
  • Optimizing our billing so that we aren’t paying for more seats than we need
  • Retiring old software we no longer need and finding new tools that could help us

Our full software stack is documented in

.