In short, help me build a playbook for hiring great operations managers, by telling me about the best operators you've ever managed hired or managed. What made them great? How'd you find them? How would you find more? I'll share all the results when they're done.

This is a general callout to everyone in startup operations who wants to hire better people, and who wants to do it more intelligenntly and reliably.

You might be a

• VP or Head of Operations, looking for General Managers or Operations Managers
• A General Manager, looking for great Operations Managers or Leads
• A Division Manager, looking for great Managers under you

Basically — if you're in a tech company that has a lot of physical operations, enough to warrannt having a Head of Ops or a COO — this is for you.

I'm trying to repeat an exercise I did at Lyft, where we built a collaborative playbook for hiring great customer service people.

But this time it's for people in tech company operations — operations managers, city managers, general managers.

(Why operations? Because it's operations managers in startups are different, and it's an evolving science on how to hire good ones.)

We all have those people in our teams who are dead-set legends. (That's Australian for "Awesome".)

Those legends are people who soak up anything with a smile, when other people would have quit long ago.

These are mine:

• At Lyft, this was Jayson Fetterley. He was an indomitable force who could do anything from command a room, bend ugly SQL tables to his will and fly across a country at a moment's notice. He could learn anything, and then do it himself, when others would say "that's not my job" or just try to get someone else to do it.
• At Unity Asset Management (a multi-family office investment fund) it was Fiona Chak (not big on LI but I can get her for you), who rose from being a front office assistant to managing all client work for the fund AND the family office's many operations.
• At Groupon it was Alex Lin, who absorbed feedback like Gatorade on a hot day and who was promoted something like five times in six months (and several times more after I left).

It's so fun talking about great people!

About these legends, I always thought:

• How did we get these people?
• How do we keep them?
• How do we find more?

This is what I'm hoping to figure out for everyone.

So tell me about your favourite people.

Once I get about 100 responses, I'll compile the responses, and share it with everyone who helped.

PS If you're interested in this generally but don't want to specifically help with this, you can sign up to my email list and I'll keep you in the loop.