This is an overview of how we define and distribute our responsibilities. We have a CEO who is ultimately responsible for all business decisions, but we operate very much as a team with a flat structure. Everyone on the team can raise concerns and initiate changes. Different team members may lead smaller groups within the team, with "leading" being a role which means helping to organize the work for a group or project and summarizing group decisions to share with the larger team.
As a corporation (U.S. S corporation to be exact), we also have a board. The board provides high-level strategic guidance and support, and oversight of our financial health. They leave the work of running the business, goal-setting, and execution to the team.
We have defined our main responsibilities within the company in five areas: Content, Technology, Marketing, Support, and Business. Each area has a way of tracking (Trello or GitHub) that is used to share the current team priorities for that area, identify quarterly goals, and provide space for adding new ideas. Every calendar quarter (e.g. January–March, April–June, etc.) we decide, as a group, what the quarterly team goals are. These are reviewed and updated as needed each month throughout the quarter. (You can see our current goals in the Ideas and Goals Trello board.)
Here is an overview of what each area covers and our main tasks for that area.
We have a range of content that we create, publish, and manage. The most obvious is written and video tutorials, along with blog posts. Content is created by both the internal team and external subject matter expert contractors.
As a team, occasionally along with external contractors, we fix bugs, do updates, add features, and generally run our websites (the production site, plus development and QA). We use GitHub for our ticketing system, and all code repositories for our sites are located there.
Our marketing efforts include managing our advertising, event sponsorships, brand consistency, and public communication.
We use a service called ZenDesk, which provides a support management system, where we track all customer support requests. Email sent to our public emails and social media mentions are directed to our support site, which then creates a ticket for us. We have a primary support manager and all full-time staff are expected to answer questions as secondary support.
We also create goals for working on the business itself and the tasks necessary for running a company. While the CEO takes on many of these tasks, like accounting and employee benefits, everyone on the team is involved with how we run our business, and major decisions and changes are discussed, decided, and implemented as a team.