Written SOPs are almost never used. I have spent enough time in operations to say this with reasonable confidence. Teams write them during onboarding pushes, often under pressure from a process audit or a new hire. They sit in Notion or a Google Drive folder. They go out of date within 60 days because the tool changed or the process changed or someone found a faster way to do it and updated their personal practice without updating the document. When a new hire looks for guidance on how to do a task, the written SOP either does not exist or describes a process that no longer matches what actually happens.
The WSG approach to this was different from the start, and it was partly accidental. The team was distributed and remote. Synchronous training was impractical. So when someone needed to learn a task, the trainer recorded a Loom while doing it. Not a prepared, scripted walkthrough. The actual task, being done in real time, with narration explaining the decisions being made.
The SOP became the recording. The recording became the library.
How the library works in practice
Every Loom gets a name that includes three things: the client or context, the task, and the date. Not “FBA Transfer” but “ARP-US FBA Transfer Thought Process - 2021-08-30.” Not “Buy Box” but “BB% Explained - Army Painter - 2021-05-17.”
The naming convention matters more than it sounds. After three years of consistent recording, the library has hundreds of videos. The only way to find a specific one without watching everything is to search by a recognizable name. Generic names create an unusable archive. Specific names create a searchable one.
Videos addressed to specific people work better than generic training recordings. “For Dorie: Remote Fulfillment in California” tells Dorie this is for her. She is more likely to watch it with attention, and more likely to ask follow-up questions, than if the video is addressed to no one in particular. The personalization also makes the video context-specific. Dorie’s situation is not identical to the next person who needs to learn remote fulfillment, but the video explains the decisions being made in Dorie’s actual account, which makes it more useful than a generic overview.
The trigger for making a Loom
Any task that a team member asks about more than once gets a Loom. That is the rule. First time someone asks, answer the question. Second time someone asks, record a Loom while you answer it. Third time someone asks, send them the Loom.
This sounds like a low bar. It is. It means the library grows organically from actual pain points rather than from someone’s idea of what should be documented. The tasks that get recorded are the tasks people actually get confused about. The tasks that never get recorded are either straightforward enough that nobody asks twice, or so rarely performed that the confusion never repeats. Both of those are fine.
What the library looks like after three years
After three years of consistent use, the WSG Loom library covers the full operational range of an Amazon FBA management team: metrics posting, buy box management, FBA transfer thought process, inventory planner walkthroughs in multiple parts, boat shipment forecasting, flat file uploads, coupon creation, IPI report sharing, BFCM planning. It also covers judgment tasks that are hard to encode in a written SOP: how to think about a purchase order decision when sales velocity is changing, how to prioritize between two out-of-stock SKUs when you cannot restock both immediately.
The thought process recordings are the most valuable ones. A step-by-step SOP for creating an FBA shipment is useful but becomes obsolete when Amazon changes the shipment creation workflow, which it does several times a year. A recording of someone working through the decision of how much inventory to send, reasoning out loud about sell-through rate and supply limits and warehouse capacity, remains useful even when the interface changes because the decision logic does not change.
Where the library has gaps
The library’s weakness is searchability. Loom’s search works on video names and descriptions, not on transcripts, at least in the standard plan. A video about the FBA transfer thought process may be exactly what someone needs, but if they search for “how much to send to Amazon” they may not find it.
The gap worth closing: pair each significant Loom with a short written checklist in Asana or Notion. Not a full rewrite of the video. Just a list of the five to ten steps the video covers, with the Loom linked at the top. The checklist is searchable. The Loom is the depth. Someone can use the checklist to confirm they followed the process and watch the Loom if they hit something they do not understand.
After the first year of doing this, the volume of repeated questions from the same team members dropped noticeably. Not because people got smarter. Because the answers existed, were findable, and actually reflected the current state of the work.
