SV Academy
SV Academy is an online program that aims to democratize the tech industry by teaching the skills necessary to become a successful tech sales representative. In the program students work closely with experienced instructors to learn the ins and outs of the industry while networking with alumni and industry leaders to gain the real-life experience necessary to advance their careers. There I served as the Director of Program Operations.
Created Revenue Collection Process
Some of the work I'm most proud of during my time with SV Academy is my collaboration with our financial parter, Stride Funding. When I took over managing the Operations Team at SV the efforts for collecting tuition payment were scattered and ineffective. We used a buy now, pay later model as our primary revenue stream, and many were failing to pay later. To tackle that problem I worked with Stride to create educational material, information sessions, and knowledge checks that would serve to inform customers of their tuition obligation. I spent many months creating internal processes and policies for ensuring customers were aware of their payment obligation and held to it. As a result tuition committments increased from 89% to 100% each month and the time it took to get them decreased by 50%.
Implemented Ticketing System
Not long after I joined the Operations Team I noticed there weren't any firm agreements for who, or which team, was responsible for providing customer support to learners. This explained why questions, requests for assistance, and complaints were left unaddressed. This isn't atypical for start-ups, but also isn't great for scaling. Since Slack was the primary method of communication for our staff and learners, I searched for a low-cost ticketing system that would integrate with the platform and not require our learners to navigate to a separate webpage. The solution I found was HALP, a new Atlassian product. This application allowed me to create a unique Slack channel for support requests and assign them to members of the Program Team. I instituted a policy that no ticket should be left without a response for more than 3 hours, and ran weekly reports to ensure integrity. Additionally, Halp analytics capabilities allowed us to collect data that provided valuable insight into which areas of our program were most challenging, confusing, and rewarding, information that prooved very usefull in enhancing our product.
Established Process Management System
What I love about start-ups is the lack of organizational infrastructure. It's all about getting a product to market in the early days. But at a certain point process and policy become crucial. And that's where I like to come in. SV Academy was no different from any other start-up in this way. Until I began managing the Ops Team, all process and policy lived in my predecessor's head. But when I came on board the company had seen unprecendented growth, tripled its staff, and desperatly needed some operational structure. This was great news for me because I love organizing information and creating process and policy that is easy to understand, easy to execute, and easy to scale. And that's what I did for SV. I used Notion to document all of our processes and policies, so they could be easily executed and updated as growth demanded it. With this I was able to eliminate a single source of failure and foster collaboration by creating something in writing to which stakeholders could provide input.
Created Learner Assessment Strategy
As SV began attracting a larger learner base, we quickly found that we needed to streamline the way we vetted our learners if we were going to continue to be successful. What we had done in the past was painfully time consuming and couldn't be done at scale. So I worked with our Data Team to identify the assessement metrics most important to us, and built out an assessment process that could be executed weekly. In conjunction I created a three-strike policy to be enforced if it was determined a learner didn't meet the demands of the program and needed to be removed from it.