Scale with clarity, leverage Operational experience

I am a fractional COO to an AI tech company. They have strong sales and technical proficiency, very smart developers, and great recruitment and administration capabilities. They represent a cutting edge AI product, which will in time become a standard for financial institutions. There is a lot going for the company. What they needed was a wise and experienced person to help them formalise their processes and scale their business.

A COO’s role may be compared to the oil in the machine. The work a COO does is not obvious in and of itself, but without it, the machine can slow or even seize. I have played a full COO role for this organisation, and worked strategically and operationally. 

Working with the founders, I have:

• Facilitated a process to define the business’s purpose (Simon Sinek’s "WHY”)

• Challenged the business model to support recurring revenue as well as tactical income

• Negotiated with business partners

• Put together plans for strategic customers

• Defined, reviewed and implemented processes 

• Provided templates and best-practise experience

• Provided mentorship to the founders

• Provided delivery capacity on projects

The client is a hybrid business, with a fully remote software team. I have run remote teams before, but felt we needed to be better. The Software Team Lead and I jointly attended Github’s Remote Teams training to learn about how to be efficient in this way of working. 

One of the items that was listed in the training was the concept of an online handbook. This is the source of truth for all staff – from ‘how do I apply for leave' to ‘the defined business development process’. Github has open-sourced their company handbook, and it is a major component in their success as the world’s largest all-remote business.

We ran a project to create an internal handbook: 

• The first step was to define the tooling we would use. A technical person considered a number of options and we selected a tool.

• Each department provided a participant to 'the handbook project', and together we defined the content for the site.

• The technical person did the initial styling and coached the rest of us about how to do the work

The handbook was launched at a company meeting, and we ran a process to encourage usage and gather feedback.

The ‘handbook team’ met on a weekly and then a monthly basis to review the handbook, assess new ideas and items that needed to be updated. It remains a central resource in running the company’s operations.