Building an operations organization
How technical operations grew alongside customer support.
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.