Process Thinking

At Level 3, you're not just improving workflows—you're shaping them. You help design, coordinate, and evolve team processes so they scale with clarity and consistency. You think in terms of end-to-end flow and collaborate with teammates to reduce friction, duplication, or ambiguity. You recognize when the current system is limiting your team's impact and work with others to make meaningful improvements.

Key Behaviors

  • Helps design or revise team-wide workflows and practices
  • Facilitates process alignment across roles and disciplines
  • Coordinates changes to documentation, rituals, and tooling
  • Analyzes where processes break down and proposes systemic fixes
  • Considers consistency, scalability, and cross-team impact when iterating

Common Struggles

  • May default to top-down process fixes without enough input
  • Can underestimate the communication needed for process changes to stick
  • Might over-optimize for predictability at the cost of flexibility

Success Indicators

You know you're successful when you:

  • Lead or co-lead process improvements that benefit the whole team
  • Balance structure and adaptability in designing workflows
  • Help teammates adopt, adapt, and evolve shared processes
  • Build workflows that reduce confusion and support team outcomes

Mindset Shift

From:

"This process works for my team."

To:

"This process supports alignment and delivery across teams."

Questions to Ask Yourself

  • Who else depends on or interacts with our workflows?
  • Where do things break down between teams?
  • What would this process look like if we had to scale it?

Build These Habits

  • 1
    Share proposed process changes early and often
  • 2
    Co-create solutions with those affected by the change
  • 3
    Observe and document what happens *after* a process change is introduced

Seek Feedback

  • "Did this change make things clearer or more confusing?"
  • "Are we solving the right workflow problem—or just the most visible one?"
  • "What part of our process makes collaboration harder than it needs to be?"

Signals You're Ready to Level Up

  • Your process changes are adopted beyond your immediate team
  • You're known for improving how the team works together
  • You think in systems, not just steps

Focus Summary

  • Connect the dots
  • Scale clarity
  • Design for better teamwork

At Level 3, process thinking is about design and collaboration. You improve the flow of work by improving how the work flows.