Issue 11. No-Touch Operations That's Not DIY

‘No-touch’ operations should be the goal of any research firm that wants to scale. Not low-touch. Not self-serve. Not a slick UI hiding a battalion of operators or an off-shore project team. Actual no-touch: work that runs on its own once the rules are set.

There are precious few assets that firms in our space can build on their own. One of them is indomitable execution.

Indomitable execution is not process efficiency. Process efficiency is good, but even a smooth manual process still requires people and has a tendency toward entropy.

I’ve spoken with enough founders and CS leaders to hear the numerous reasons why no-touch operations is “impossible.” Some just don’t want to focus on it: what they’ve built is good enough. More often, though, it is that they feel their current ways of working can’t be streamlined any further. Scratch deeper on this one and you will typically hear a variation on the theme of “we can’t do it because it will limit necessary flexibility the client ‘needs’,” which itself is a reflection of an incomplete or underdeveloped operating model. There are, presently at least, few consequences to being a bit heavy on the cost side of the business—especially in growth-stage firms where revenue growth is prioritized over efficiency, or in mature businesses where the operational knots have become too tight to easily untangle. I certainly wouldn’t bet on that being the case given what AI is presently capable of.

When I say ‘no-touch,’ I am not suggesting either DIY or the telepathic reception of a brief and specs from a client. I mean that, once the project is set up, the work should flow through to final delivery without someone needing to interpret, double-check, or reroute it. The maximum involvement should be validation. No interventions or handholding. Processes should be defined, configurable based on clients needs and other controllable variability. But not based on tribal knowledge that only lives in someone’s head. Above all, it means being ruthless about removing any step that exists only to catch what the system failed to do.

This kind of operating model doesn’t emerge by accident. It has to be engineered. You do it not just to reduce costs. You do it because it creates real operating leverage to move faster, grow more easily, deliver more reliably, and gain margin. The alternative is to keep throwing bodies at the work until you're outmaneuvered.