# Building an operations organization

How technical operations grew alongside customer support.

My role: I built the operations function and led its growth, including staffing and budget decisions.

## The first operations role

I began with customer support and hands-on work building and troubleshooting servers. As the company grew, I built a dedicated technical operations function alongside the support team.

## Teams for the growing workload

As the work expanded, I decided where to add capacity and which responsibilities needed a specialist team. I hired people for that work and developed leaders to take responsibility for delivery in their areas.

## Who owns the decision

Team leaders run their own areas; I handle decisions that affect the wider organization. I set priorities and established reporting and coordination practices so teams could raise problems and settle who needed to act.

## Business decisions across teams

I work with company leaders on business decisions that need a technical perspective. That has included bringing executives together to work through product pricing and taking responsibility for business intelligence as a company function. In supplier negotiations, I use actual demand to assess what we are buying and how the contract is structured. I negotiate directly where appropriate and put options in front of finance or product leaders when they own the decision.

[Read about product delivery](https://raidz.net/work/delivery/)

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