🐄 NOAH AVERBACH // ARMRA VP OF PROCESS

0:01I'm Sam Rose, and this is Commerce's Chaos, the podcast where we talk about what really happens when you're scaling a consumer brand. No fluff, no fairy tales, just the hard real life moments that every founder faces. From inventory nightmares to PR wins gone wrong to that sinking feeling when your bestselling product just got knocked off, we're covering the chaos that comes with commerce. Because if you're building something real, you know it's never as clean as the highlight reel makes it look. Noah, you have one of the most interesting titles I've actually ever encountered, you are VP of process at Armra, which is, seems like a role that's becoming more critical as brand scale, but it's not like, it's not like every brand has this role.

0:41So I'd love to just walk through what led Armra to create this position. Did they create it just for you? Did you create it when you were there? And then jumping from there, like what's a week look like in the, in the life of a VP of process?

0:55Noah Averbach:Absolutely. Yeah, you know, it's a continuing work in progress. So, you know, we're figuring out what it means every single day. I'm certainly figuring out what it means every single day. the role was definitely created for me at Armora and you know I kind of was handed the reins of saying hey you know you need to go in here and fix a problem over on the operation side and now fix a problem on the CX side and now fix a problem on the marketing side and then make sure all those problems are solved and talking to each other. And so that's sort of what I wind up doing every day is kind of connecting the dots between the disparate departments and how they work and their priorities and making sure that they actually are talking to each other in one way or another.

1:52Noah Averbach:And then making sure when something goes wrong, everybody knows exactly who to get angry at, because it's probably my fault for not telling everybody. We're going to call Noah. yeah what's supposed to happen and it's exactly it how big is your team and then how big is the org and where do you kind of sit in it so again very very unique interesting setup um i have a team of i think we're at 10 project managers who report up to me which is pretty much unheard of and then I report directly to the COO. So, you know, essentially the way I kind of like to describe it is that I am a third chief of staff and like work super closely with C-suite to kind of understand their directives or their pain points or the things that are really, really priority for whatever reason this week.

2:52Noah Averbach:And then I have this team of project managers who are sort of assigned and seeded out into all the different departments. And, you know, they can kind of take whatever those directives are and flow them out into their departments and work super closely with the leads of that department. And they kind of, you know, ICs in that department to do a couple things. The first thing is that wherever you drop into the company, there you are. You know, it's like we're all running in sort of a similar fashion. Obviously, each one is going to have their own idiosyncrasies, but everybody is sort of looking the same.

3:35Noah Averbach:So if, you know, C-suite needs to drop into CX or into operations or into marketing, they don't have to spend a day figuring out how this team works compared to another team. And then the other thing is, is that, you know, the project managers reporting back into me allows me to have a really clear eyed view about what is and isn't working at the company from like, you know, down to like, hey, so and so isn't talking to this person this week. Or, you know, hey, we have like a completely broken workflow that is causing this huge roadblock and we need to find us all for the next 45 minutes. And then I can sort of float all of that back up to, you know, the C-suite and make sure that there is kind of a true visibility across the organization vertically.

4:22Noah Averbach:And then the kind of last thing is the actual process part of it, which is instituting, you know, more than just like an SOP, but workflows and new, you know, if we implement something that particularly if it crosses multiple departments, making sure that there's adoption across the board or making sure that if something is implemented and sucks and everybody hates it and, you know, that I get in there and figure out, well, you know, what did that? Usually I do wrong. I'd like to say somebody else did wrong, but it's usually me. And trying to get in there and fix it. That's very noble of you. Every operator listening to this right now is falling in love with you, by the way.

5:04They're like, I need a NOAA. It's happening to me. I'm like, wait. This is such an incredible generalist kind of position to be able to inhabit in the business. but really for you to just be able to drop in, like you said, to any different type of operational area and say, Hey, like there's a problem. We can fix it with people. We can fix it with process. Um, and, and, and like, let's kind of, you know, rally the troops and get it done. Do you have, um, how often are you identifying the bottleneck versus someone saying, Hey, um,

5:43Noah Averbach:you know, um, It's less and less now because I'm less in the weeds of the day-to-day operations of how individual departments are working compared to how it was in the past. So a lot of the time it's my team or other team members coming to me and being like, it's sort of a combination, right? Because they're not coming to me usually and say, hey, I found a bottleneck. Isn't this great? They're coming and saying, hey, this project that I asked for in January still hasn't got the finish line. It's officially your problem now. And so that's an indicator to me that there is a bottleneck somewhere in there.

6:20Noah Averbach:And then it's up to me and to my team to kind of figure out, okay, why did this happen? The kind of regular Sherlock Holmes of an organization. And sometimes we figure it out. And sometimes we're just there scratching our head and we sweep it under the carpet and hope that it goes away. But, you know, for the for the most part, you know, when people float up those reoccurring problems or brand new problems, that kind of gives me the tip off like, hey, let's go investigate in there. And a lot of the times, you know, I'm sure anybody who's experienced this, that the broken part happens so far away from where the call out is, that it's a whole series of looking back and saying, okay, this happened, this happened, this happened, going through all the documentation until you finally figure out, oh, I think actually the problem was honestly usually me setting up wrong in the beginning.

7:13Noah Averbach:And then the problem solved right there, I just won't do that again. Again, yet again. making the mess and cleaning it up. Exactly. Do you have a process for your process? Like, do you have a diagnostic framework that's like, okay, my steps for rebuilding, for diagnosing a problem or a bottleneck and rebuilding the process around it. This is very meta, but I have to ask. Sure. I think what I really have is like a priority list. You know what I mean? It's like, what's the priority here? And how does that relate to the actual business goals, right? The mission critical projects. Because a lot of the time, like, there's stuff that I would love to get in and tweak and turn and twist.

7:53Noah Averbach:But a lot of the times, like, I have to be the one that says, hey, I understand that's a problem for you. It's going to have to get solved next week. This week's not the week. You know, in terms of, like, a framework of how to deal with those different problems, there's, you know, there's, like, feasibility building. There's all of that kind of stuff. I'm sorry, my dog has entered the conversation. I mean, put him on speaker. He probably has more to say about all of this. He's really cute. And there's all that kind of internal stuff, like making a matrix for like, hey, how do I rank this problem?

8:40Noah Averbach:How do I rank this new project, right? Like what's the feasibility matrix on this? So like coming up with a series of questions and getting those kind of a score and then a certain score landing within the within like a risk tolerance. You know, that's the sort of stuff that I'm doing. Sometimes it's active. Sometimes it's just, you know, I've been here long enough to know that if you say these three words that that's getting a red, you know, a red alert immediately, whatever it might be. I got to know, like, give me three words. What are your red alerts? my red alerts probably are this my red alerts are probably going to be this will be no big deal this will be really easy um we should get this done fast um those are usually times for me to say okay like are we sure about that you know does that mean what does that really mean and then i think you know my my other red alerts are a lot of the time like uh if we need to involve another department in a way that I know is, is, is a huge lift for them that another team might not know.

9:46Noah Averbach:So like, I'm sure this will be easy for the operations team. That's a classic red alert. I'm sure this will be easy for the CX team. Low, low lift on the marketing team. That's like, you know, it's, it's those things that sort of what make me really dig in and figure out like, you know, okay, what's, what's the actual thing lift going to be? It's somebody else's problem. Exactly. That's exactly it. If it's somebody else's problem, it's probably going to be my problem. It's probably going to be your problem. Okay. So you've got a problem. It's at your doorstep. You think about priorities at the business.

10:20You kind of make a rank order. And then you listen for flags or signals that like this might be a bigger lift than the person asking. And when they're coming to you to ask, they're saying, hey no like i need help building a process here sometimes and then sometimes they're just like

10:39Noah Averbach:sometimes it's you know you connect the dots for me right like yeah yeah we have a new we have a new product and we want to you know create a beautiful box or kitted you know custom solution can the operations team do this in this timeline and then you know part of my job obviously you know to bring in the correct ops team as member to bridge those gaps or to just be like hey you know before we even spend 45 minutes getting on a call and talking through this i'm going to tell you this is not possible and you need to figure out another solution today um so it's a lot of it's a lot of that and then you know in terms of like building new processes we're growing so fast and so much is happening for the first time that a lot of the time it's like okay that first time we've never done this before so what worked what didn't work and then how can we keep what we like, get rid of what we didn't like and start to kind of chisel it into stone a little bit.

11:38Noah Averbach:So that way the next time people know what to do and I don't have to be as involved, that the project managers can come in and just sort of shepherd our project across the finish line without the sort of bumpy back and forth that we had the time before. And do you find that exercising this muscle within the organization and having, you know, teams and custodians of this sort of like process based approach. Is that a creative? Does everybody kind of get better at process management and project management at the business as a whole? Because it's like, clearly it's been prioritized to the tune of having someone who's like, you know, the absolute guardian and expert of it.

12:16Noah Averbach:Oh, yeah, definitely. I think it becomes everybody's responsibility, you know. And I think, you know, it also empowers people to bring things to the table and say like, Hey, can we take a look at this? Can we adjust this? And I think it also sort of takes away that feeling of like, F it, I'm just going to like throw it up here and hope somebody sees it because people know that a, you know, if they're put in that situation, there's somebody they can go to, to help at least if there's nothing there to like, you know, build the safety net as they're jumping. And B, you know, maybe there's something there that they haven't just encountered yet.

12:59Noah Averbach:This is their first time. So there's a bunch of resources and folks and documentation for them to go to and, you know, see if we've been here before. Is there like a tipping point for organizational size where something like this really starts to make, I mean, so obvious to me, like, this is amazing. Is there a tipping point for size where you're like, hey, someone's really interested in this approach. You've inspired them to say, you know, a new business owner, how big do you have to be to deserve this and, and, or to afford it? And if you're not that big yet, what are like the stepping stones to take to get to a place where, yes, like we're big enough to have a VP of process and 10 project managers reporting up and like, I mean, to have that amount of systems building capability is incredible.

13:50Noah Averbach:When I started, you know, I started about two years ago at Armra, there were 13 people. And, you know, I was the first project manager there. And it was just so it was so obvious, like, I'm sure so many people have experienced this in those early days of a company. It's like, as you start to move from like six to 13 and from like 13 to like 25, you can no longer just sort of everybody hop on a huddle or a Slack or an email chain and just like figure it out together. You know, that's sort of that first point where you actually just need to instill some sort of functional flow. So people know what to do and you don't have that thing where, you've sent something off and it's been created, people spend time and money on it, and then you get it back and it's not what you thought.

14:40Noah Averbach:And you could have to look through and say, okay, who made the mistake here? Or did we all make a mistake? And we're having to sort through Slack messages from six months ago and images that don't make any sense anymore. I think really our tipping point was around the I mean, we started when it was still pretty small, I think. I mean, I think it was in like the 30-ish person range, maybe a little bit more. But I think even then, you know, starting to lay those super strong foundations of how the organization should work and being able to start to organize what will soon become the history of the organization is super crucial because in a year and a half, you're going to be asking, you know, where is this contract we signed?

15:34Noah Averbach:How much are we paying this person? Why did we do this? You know, where is the packaging that we approved? And why, what, and what, what the hell were we thinking? You know, so, you know, there's the, the sooner you can start the better, because I think once you start to hit a growth trajectory, things spiral, I don't want to say spiral out of control, but they just grow so quickly that it's just so hard to kind of keep reining things in if there's not folks who are dedicated to doing it. And I think particularly departments start to splinter as well. They start to become fragmented and they start to lose the easy ability to speak to each other as their work gets more and more specialized.

16:20Noah Averbach:So I think that's a good indicator of like, oh, wow, the CX team and the operations team used to work hand in hand when there were two people. But now that they have full teams and their workflows are so much different, they have completely different technologies, they're not able to talk to each other in the same way. And it's not because they don't like each other. It's because there's no connective tissue between them on how to continue to grow. So yeah, I think there's like indicators that come up as opposed to like a hard, you know, size in terms of personnel. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

17:02And what you're getting into is this question of sort of inadvertent information silos between teams. I'm curious how you start to systematize that approach to like creating visibility, accountability. Arts on the table. Your tech stack is held together with duct tape and prayers. If you're a brand founder or COO juggling Shopify, your 3PL portal, three different inventory trackers, and yes, that one crucial Google sheet, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Orders get lost, inventory counts are fiction, and your seamless integrations break every other Tuesday. Endless Commerce changes the game.

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18:26Noah Averbach:Well, I think it becomes like a lot because we have all these project managers, it becomes their responsibility to almost act as that creative tissue. Because a lot of the times, like, you know, we love to move fast, we love to move aggressive, which means things change that might have happened in a two person call that have ripple effects across the organization. And it's great if you can catch it in that call and nail it and be like, yes, you know, press this button and then it slides across the rest of the organization. But often, you know, you're moving it just as fast as them. And so you have, you know, 10 other things to activate on that.

19:02Noah Averbach:So when you have this sort of connective tissue of project managers, it becomes their responsibility to disseminate that information and also to know what information is relevant to their department. So, you know, when they sort of work as a team, you know, if a date gets changed or a, you know, a sale is activated or whatever, each team knows what that means for them and knows what questions to ask and knows what information they need to bring to their team. So I think, you know, we sort of have like a project management charter for each individual team. So like, here's what you're responsible for.

19:39Noah Averbach:Here's what you should keep an eye out. And every other project manager also can relate to that. So when something changes, there's all these kind of redundancies, which is like, okay, well, the first step is let's alert the person needs to know. The second step, you know, redundancy is like, well, now we have this meeting where we're going through all the changes that have been made. And then the third one is, you know, hey, I think this got missed, but I'm still here. I'm going to stick my nose where it doesn't belong and make sure you have the information you need. And so it sounds like people are a really important part of making all of this work.

20:14And of course, people in technology are kind of going hand in hand. Is there a basic PM stack that you come back to as like, okay, we're going to be talking in Slack and we're going to have either this many meetings a week or not more than X number of meetings a week. And, you know, broad corporate culture, of course, changes opinion on this every few years. So it's like, we're doing meetings. We're not doing meetings. It's like, we're doing Slack. No, we're doing synchronous communication. What's your stack?

20:43Noah Averbach:We have our, we use, you know, our project management hardware. We use Monday. So everybody is familiar with that and knows exactly, you know, it's almost like a uniform across departments with small changes. So that way, everybody's kind of communicating that way. We have our sort of weekly check-ins. We have our smaller team check-ins. We have our ad hoc check-ins.

21:09Noah Averbach:and you know the thing that's interesting is like because each department is so different like they're very autonomous right like I'm not really trying to micromanage them or you know say what's going on I kind of let them go off manage their workflow within their department and then flow back to me and that team for those check-ins so I try to keep it as loose and autonomous as possible because they are going to have so much better eyes and ears of what's actually going on, what's working, what's not working than I possibly could. So I think in terms of stack, it's really like one main check-in, very standardized workflows when it comes to gathering actual approvals, running things through actual check-ins with completed work.

21:59Noah Averbach:And then the rest of the time, it's like, hey, go off, know what your realm is and completely own it and come back and let us know how things are going. Yeah. And, okay, so Monday sounds like it's a piece of it. And I'm going to say the AI word. Certainly, of course. There's having, you know, kind of like systems that you've built that you've got human operators working through, then there's automations that you can add on to that, which I wouldn't call AI necessarily. I mean, lots of automations were available 10, 15 years ago too. And then there's sort of like agentic behaviors where you're maybe taking a repeated workflow from what might have been a human operator five years ago and saying, okay, well, we're just going to repeat this process ad infinitum, but with different variables coming in every time, which a basic automation can't necessarily handle.

22:56How do you think about AI and automation or, and, or automation kind of fitting in to how you're guiding your team to be using the latest tools?

23:05Noah Averbach:Yeah, it's, it's, it's a, it's a big project for us actually. Um, and kind of what I would call like our next big frontier within, within my personal team. Um, uh, I think that like, you know, I want to lift my team out of doing busy work. You know what I mean? Handing things off, doing the back and forth, things that can be automated and things that can be, you know, combined automation and AI. Like they don't really need to be doing that anymore. And what is so much more useful for them to do is to kind of, again, be that connective tissue, which is not just about, you know, handing a document back and forth, but understanding when that document lands at the team that is not their own, what's the feedback how do i gather that feedback and then how do i action it you know and then turn that into an automation after a couple of iterations so it's a huge project and it's something i'm really excited about and it also helps you know to have all those processes to have all the sops down on paper you can just start to plug in all right what's something that i think we can just we're repeating over and over what's something that we can just like plug in uh almost like plug and play on that.

24:22Yeah. Well, and I think something really interesting in what you're sharing is that there is a sense of what you're pointing at is integrations, right? But integration is human to human. And we have verbal and nonverbal communication cues that help us better integrate processes with each other because you can sit across the table and be like, okay, is this working? Is this not working? Do you understand what I'm saying? Do you not? in a way that's so much harder than with technology where you have to engineer the integration and you know one of the pain points in my business was always like i've got some amazing systems built out and when it's humans just in the systems like well we can talk to each other but unless i have literally like an api to connect these two things together or i can write a script for it or a webhook or whatever then i've got like amazing systems that don't touch each other which you know frustrated me to to no end is of course like my my new you know crusade is

25:21Noah Averbach:to like make integrated systems i mean it really is like the thing it's like you know how do how do you get something on one end of the business to travel through like you know all the different things that you know it's going to touch and then do something on the other end of the business and then bounce it all the way back to the other end of the business and let it know that it it worked or didn't work or what the feedback is. Yeah, it's a big task. But if you can make it happen, I mean, just saving those few hours of work and also just having people be able to relax and say, okay, I don't have to worry that this person forgot.

26:06Noah Averbach:You know what I mean? And instead of saying, hey, you messed up. You're the reason this is late. It's like, no, the automation isn't working. We can just fix that. I think that would make me sleep a little bit better at night. Yeah. You and I are both experiencing a little bit of PTSD. I can see you thinking back to problems of the past. Let's talk about teams for a second. And it sounds like you've got an incredible one to partner with. Like how often do you find yourself in a position where you really have to say, hey, like we can't just solve this with like a new piece of tech or we've got all the tech we need, but we need another operator inside it.

26:53Do you have a resourcing kind of decision tree around that, maybe internal versus something outsourced? Maybe like making – do you find yourself having to make the business case for like, hey, we're going to invest in X, whether that's a person or a big piece of tech? and then making the case for that. You know, I think a lot of the time,

27:13Noah Averbach:in my position anyway, which I don't think is regular, a lot of the time it has to do with looking forward to the next six months and trying to predict where growth is going to happen and setting people up there before it happens, or at least so that they land right as it's about to happen. Um, because just how, just how my bizarro and amazing department is set up is that like, you know, we want people there to shepherd it across and shepherd it forward and to grow within that department and help that department grow. So I think a lot of it has to do, uh, with being really aware of what smaller departments are going to become the core functions or the semi-core functions of the business in the next three to six to eight months and starting to understand, you know, what their pain points are and if it can be solved with an extra set of hands.

28:15Noah Averbach:And also, you know, what those hands should be doing, not just sort of, maybe not just kind of classic PMing, but also somebody who maybe has hands-on skills in that department so they can be called to lead. and you know in the larger departments things that are already more established are really already core functions of the business it's about I think a lot of the time it's about managing the workload of the person who's already covering that business but also about starting to seed great future operators into those departments which is really something fun that I get to do which is say, hey, you know, I think like you're ready to to take on a chunk of that department that no longer is kind of related to me.