After helping Node deliver world-class customer success for nearly 3 years – our CEO has asked if I would be interested in leading Business Operations affectionately known as “BizOps” together with Customer Success!
The updated responsibilities make sense for our business on two levels: 1) as we have shifted from our first product iteration – a services-heavy SaaS solution to a more developer-focused platform leveraging our API directly, the need for traditional SaaS Customer Success has lessened to some degree and 2) I’ve had the opportunity through Customer Success to ultimately help optimize performance across all functions and facilitate a better customer experience.
I’ve been a General Manager twice previously in my career for rapidly scaling start-ups – so my first step was to define exactly what the BizOps leadership role would look like at Node. This isn’t as easy as it sounds – if you were to ask 50 leaders for their definition of the Business Operations function (or even a General Manager function) – you will likely receive 50 different answers.
After much discussion within our team at Node, we believe there are (3) key areas where strong Business Operations can have a tremendous impact as the organization scales:
-Cultivating collaboration
-Pushing for efficiency and progress (data-driven)
-Testing and championing new functional solutions
Ultimately I think leading BizOps is much like being a General Manager, except a bit more proactive, particularly in a rapidly evolving company. Unlike a pure Operations capacity role which might be focused on helping connect departments for efficient delivery of product – BizOps takes a wider view across all functions to help drive efficiency and planning leveraging the capabilities of a high-performance generalist.
