BizOps for Tech Startups:

From First-Principles

What Is BizOps?

First and foremost, “Business Operations” is a terrible name for what this discipline represents. Simply put, BizOps is a catch-all term for internal strategy consultants who possess the ability to execute their plans. In essence, BizOps is meant to ensure the company’s survival—everything else is secondary. You know your company is dying when the rhythm of work slows, customer growth becomes linear, or worse, competitors launch simpler products that elegantly address your customers' core needs, talent leaves or becomes impossible to attract, or when there's no fire driving your mission. BizOps serves as both the cure and prophylactic measure for this state of crisis. BizOps are generalists in the purest sense, and you will need to learn and do things outside of the scope of tasks you’ve done before.

The reason why so many articles written about BizOps sound so dense, abstract, and jargon-riddled is that this is an extremely general profession (your BizOps role specificity is dependent on the industry you are in and your company’s scale). Thus, we learn a lesson we’ll address again later: The cost of generalizability is abstractness. It will be difficult to gain real knowledge about this profession from a general overview. Conversely, by narrowing my focus to tech startups and specific examples, I gain knowledge transferability, and you gain specific understanding.

People in BizOps can be categorized based on their degree of agency—the single determining factor that defines their scope of responsibility within an organization. Low-agency individuals become confined to single-dimensional tasks, whereas high-agency individuals handle multidimensional problems across a broad scope. At a startup, the dimensions of BizOps (in order of importance, addressing existential threats first) are: Strategy Consulting + Execution, Vital Employee Gap Coverage, Day-to-Day Operations, Analytics, Finance, and Planning. Agency is who you are in this role, just get shit done with low oversight and you’ll be ahead of the pack.

Job titles hold tertiary importance in BizOps. Recommendations you make may upset individuals far above you—but always for the benefit of the company. This is precisely why all BizOps professionals should operate under the direct protection and oversight of the CEO. Your ultimate responsibility is preventing corporate death, at all costs, not enforcing preconceived beliefs.

But to understand this profession, we must understand the purpose of the business and its place in the world.

The Endgame of Business

Peter Thiel’s favorite Casablanca quote paraphrased is: “You must begin by studying the endgame.” In this way, I’d like you to imagine the ultimate state of the business–in its most successful permutation, how large will this company be and what will it do?

You simplify your area of thought by taking the extreme case of what is possible and building a case from that position. Mathematicians often construct their problems with respect to the infinite to simplify a problem and also say something concrete about finite things, we should commit to the same process. In the infinite game of business, we can create similar parameters and calculations such that we know what to do in any scenario.

First, imagine the end state of your business, then let’s examine it from first principles by asking questions:

1. Is it operating in an existing market, or are you creating a market from scratch?

2. Is this a technology/time-based opportunity where only 1-4 winners will be crowned?

3. Are you optimizing things that already exist, or are you creating new processes?

4. Does your product get more valuable the more people use it?

5. Do you need to research and develop the solution to the problem before you launch?

6. Is it implicitly easy to replicate your success? Does your business have a secret?

7. Who needs to be a part of your business for it to exist? Would they want to commit the time?

8. Is there demand for this problem to be solved implicitly? Are you hoping demand will be created by its existence?

9. Is this a venture-backable business (I wouldn’t care if your business has already raised money)? Do you even need venture capital?

10. How large and how fast does this company need to grow to be defensible? What growth metrics need to be true for the ideal outcome?

Each of these questions, answered and explored, gives you interesting truths that must occur to reach the ideal state of the business. Imagine a payments platform is your business:

1. Is this operating in an existing market, or are you creating a market from scratch?

• This is already a mature space with big names (e.g., Stripe, PayPal, Adyen) competing. The problem is paying a merchant money; the current iteration of the solution is payment gateways through participating regulated financial networks.

2. Is this a technology/time-based opportunity where only 1-4 winners will be crowned?

• No, it’s competitive, but there’s still room for niche or specialized offerings. The window isn’t necessarily limited to just a few winners, though you’ll face significant hurdles to stand out.

3. Are you optimizing things that already exist, or are you creating new processes?

• Primarily optimizing existing financial and technical flows. Payment gateways and processors already exist; you’re essentially refining how transactions are routed, secured, and integrated.

4. Does your product get more valuable the more people use it?

• There can be partial network effects. As transaction volume scales, you could negotiate lower interchange or gain deeper partnerships with financial institutions. Ultimately, no.

5. Do you need to research and develop the solution to the problem before you launch?

• No, you must abide by a set of regulatory hurdles and implement a defined technical solution.

6. Is it implicitly easy to replicate your success? Does your business have a secret?

• A payment gateway must meet PCI DSS standards, implement robust security, and form relationships with banks and credit card networks. Difficult, but few secrets.

7. Who needs to be a part of your business for it to exist? Would they want to commit the time?

• With defined operational and technical hurdles, there should be no shortage of engineers and operators who could do the job.

8. Is there demand for this problem to be solved? Are you hoping demand will be created by its existence?

• You aren’t inventing a new type of transaction; you’re offering an alternative to existing gateways. There is existing demand.

9. Is this a venture-backable business (I wouldn’t care if your business has already raised money)? Do you even need venture capital? 

• Payments is VC fundable, however, most of the value will be captured by incumbents unless a significant differentiator is being employed. Ideally, you wouldn’t need venture capital to start since many of the core issues were solved and you can learn lessons from your competitors, but you’ll need venture to scale and protect your moat.

10. How large and how fast does this company need to grow to be defensible? What growth metrics need to be true for the ideal outcome?

• At a TAM of $198 billion in 2032, starting at 100 customers ($1000 annual revenue each) now and a growth rate of 12 percent per month, you’d be at less than .7% of the market by 2032, $1.36 billion in revenue. 

• Can you sustain the growth over that period with the probable strength of the competition? What alternative paths are available to make this possible?

You can reverse engineer a successful outcome once you know the ideal state. Every action and strategy you employ should be with the ideal state in mind; however, please understand that at different periods in the life cycle of the company, BizOps will need to do different things for the same situation.

• For example, customer acquisition will be different at 100 customers vs. 100,000 customers. In the beginning, it is worth the effort to go to huge lengths to get single customers, whereas at 100K customers you should be employing optimizations.

  • Abstractly: for the function of the current x position, you should do y

This should give you some idea of the type of business you will be helping operate, the obtainable growth rate, and the expected ideal outcome of its success. By doing this exercise, you can imagine the position of your company in the abstract space of competition, problems/solutions, potential returns, customers, and success chances based on the parameters of the business as it stands now. Your job after understanding the endgame is figuring out which parameters to tune such that you get your ideal outcome and how to navigate the business as you hit roadblocks.

To get to the ideal state of your business, you must have a strategy—an overarching maxim— for how your business is going to compete in the market and how you’re going to acquire and keep customers. If you want to IPO and return huge amounts of capital to your company’s investors and your colleagues, then you need to know what’s true about what it takes to go public. If you want to have a lifestyle business that nets $1MM per year, then you need to study that end game.

Strategy

“What needs to be true for X to happen?” This is the only question you need to ask when you are deciding on strategy, and to be clear, this is not an optimization function; you need to be creative in figuring out which set of variables– that your company might not even know exists – will inform the outcome you are looking for. A good strategist needs to have excellent taste, and the profession demands you read thousands of examples (both failures and successes) of strategies in action.

Strategy is (somewhat arbitrarily) picking a key part of your business to simplify and thus gain an operational advantage. Southwest Airlines only flies 1 type of plane and 1 type of route, IKEA only sells DIY furniture, Ford standardized 1 type of car, Netflix only distributed DVDs via mail, Palantir built software for only 1 type of low-level intelligence analyst (who cannot make a purchasing decision). These simplifications allow businesses to hyperfocus their differentiation, even if the tactical case could be made that a hybrid approach would be feasible and profitable. It is not unrealistic to think that Southwest could benefit from opportunistically acquiring other plane models on the cheap, or IKEA could use their brand to sell premium, pre-built, high-margin furniture, or Ford could allow customization on each car, or Netflix could allow DVD vending machines, or Palantir could chase government contracts first before building software.

However, the essence of strategy demands shutting off compound, competing processes in favor of elegance. The pinnacle of strategy is understanding the world and figuring out the least amount of effort and pain required to obtain the goal. There is a certain aesthetic nature to strategy that shouldn’t be underrated; if your strategy is beautiful, the likelihood of it being correct is higher. If a strategy is ugly or derivative, then you should greatly discount its chances of success.

“Pulchritudo est splendor veritatis” (beauty is the splendor of truth) is an ancient phrase that still holds water today. Aesthetics and truth are interrelated; humans are instinctively drawn to simplicity, elegance, and pleasing forms. From mathematics to philosophy to consumer products to the spaces we live in and build, we know that the aesthetic of things matters. Mathematician values beauty in their proofs because it is an expression of intellectual compression. It is easy to make a monster of a formula that could plot the actions of a single particle, it is harder to create the series that simplifies the creation of that formula, however, it is beautiful to plot the actions of all particles, through time, in a single expression.

Humans know instinctively that complexity is the domain of the delusional (or liars), and the highest form of oration is in compressing the world as it appears into the simplest of statements. The more words someone speaks on one topic, the more errors they commit or lies they can tell in disguise. The pithier the language, the more accurately–more fundamentally–the world is being represented. This is because all intelligence is fundamentally compression; by reducing the information to its essential features, you understand the underlying latent space of the idea better.

In BizOps, strategic compression manifests as beauty—distilling complex business problems and sprawling strategies into essential truths about the nature of the problems you are solving. A beautiful strategy, in this sense, isn't merely elegant—it could be fundamentally true, i,e. aligning perfectly with the company’s endgame and core capabilities. Simplicity in BizOps means creating clarity from chaos, precision from ambiguity, and actionable insight from dirty information.

What’s important for the BizOps professional is the implementation of the CEO’s vision. They lead the company because they possess specialized insight into the business opportunity, paired with execution potential. BizOps is not to overtake this vision, it is meant to augment it. There are impediments to the execution of the corporate vision that are outside of the wheelhouse of the CEO to grok and identify, these situations are where your role in BizOps becomes most vital. A good BizOps employee identifies an optimal outcome and works backward through a series of decisions, possibilities, and second-order effects until they can identify a workable strategy.

Let’s say you are hemorrhaging money, your team is bloated, your competition is taking away market share, and your executive team has competing visions. What do you do? There are an unlimited number of things you could do in this situation, however, we only need the handful that gets us to profitability, a team of the correct size, market defensibility, and a singular vision. BizOps is supposed to dig into the weeds and figure out the statistics of these situations: who is doing what, how much is being spent on everything, what impact does x have on y, which partners are vital, which customers are valuable, where is unnecessary development, etc. From this bird's eye view, we can pick apart facets of the business and ask the ‘What if’ questions. What if we didn’t have these customers? What if we didn’t have this department? What if we had this feature? And then we can think of everything that needs to be true to get to that state.

Depending on how fast your company is dying (or growing), your strategy may change. Consider, the range of strategies you have with 2 months of runway is far less than if you had 2 years of runway, and thus you can recommend paths that will not risk the company. However, when you only have 2 months of runway, drastic and risky action can save the company.

An example of drastic action (assuming at least a year of runway, if this was two months the decision would be made for you) would be firing the whole team except for key individuals and rebuilding from scratch, the consequences of this strategy are you not being detail-oriented enough to grok who is vital and who is redundant or you not putting the proper provisions in place to continue operations even if those key people leave. The strategy involves anticipating human reactions to your decision and managing a healthy margin of error such that you still come out on the correct side of things in the bear case and win greatly in the bull case.

Most strategies are mundane, and you may work on developing and executing 1 to 2 per year. More often than not, you will be figuring out how to: internationalize your product, increase retention, control costs, create new revenue channels, figure out product differentiation, identify new markets (maturing startups), create new monetization schemes, or restructure your org (change management). But, it’s always weirder in practice than theory—one day you are doing compliance, and the next you are structuring deals with PE firms and standing up a new department. One day, you are streamlining onboarding, and the next, you are the principal database engineer on a special project. One day, you are negotiating with financial institutions, and the next, you are hiring a team of product/infrastructure engineers for a new financial instrument. Thus, a good relationship with your CEO and trust are necessary for you to have any impact on the organization, as you’ll have a lot of leeway.

Hopefully, you will not find yourself in life-or-death situations often, but it can be fun. You should spend a month or two gathering the information, expert advice, and data necessary to back up a strategy of your design. Here are some heuristics to see if you are on the right path:

1. High-Impact, Low-Volume: Each strategy (project) you initiate should have existential weight—either it prevents death or meaningfully accelerates growth. More than three big bets means you’re likely diluting your focus.
   
   

2. Continuous Refinement, Not Infinite New Plans: BizOps is about simplification as new data or gut checks arise, not constantly churning out new half-baked plans. ‘Planning’ is anti-execution.
   
   

3. Quality Over Quantity: If you execute two major strategic shifts masterfully, your company will feel it. If you attempt six or seven and only get lukewarm results on all, it’s wasted time and energy.

If you know yourself, your business’s end state, and its current bottlenecks, you’ll create some of your life’s most impactful work.

Strategy is especially important to startups because you need to optimize for outlier success. It is more optimal to make a 1 to 9 bet to become billionaires than to make a 2 to 1 bet to become millionaires, thus, you need strategies that reflect the ideal state of your business and the demands of taking venture capital.

When done well, it feels like threading the Gordian knot; when done poorly, it gets you fired.

Simplification

In the Art of War, it is said that soldiers cannot listen or respond to the complex barking of orders from their commanders, however, they’ll listen to gongs, drums, banners, and flags. This simplification allows soldiers to understand what is required of them and execute their mission without thought. This is ideal since they can reserve their mental processes for the enemy in front of them instead of figuring out what’s going on. A good operator does the same for their org and simplifies their understanding of the world into its most basic elements such that it is obvious what to do next. By distilling complex orders into these intuitive signals, soldiers can execute their missions instinctively. Good operators can dish out tasks to be completed with the smallest amount of dependencies, and they can prioritize actions for maximum effect.

Simplification allows for the existence of tactics in your business. The tactics of a business always come in the form of questions: What do we control? What levers can be pulled? What do we prioritize? How much resource can we spare? What is the assumed compounding ROI? What is the opportunity cost?

BizOps will be in charge of implementing a set of tactics (often by yourself), at least think them through for your own sake.

If your strategy is being a low-cost provider, then your employees understand they will be graded on their cost-effectiveness. If your strategy is being an exclusive brand, then your employees know they’ll be graded on the increasing perception of quality. If your strategy is having 100% customer satisfaction, then your employee knows that their only goal is to have the happiest customers. All these strategies come at an opportunity cost; however, operationally, your company has been simplified.

Consider this practically:

• If your strategy is to be the low-cost provider, your employees immediately understand they’ll be measured on cost efficiency above all.

• If your strategy is to build an exclusive, premium brand, your team intuitively grasps that quality perception and attention to detail will determine their success.

• If your strategy prioritizes unmatched customer satisfaction, every employee knows their singular goal is to make customers feel valued, satisfied, and loyal above anything else.

Every great strategic command weaves the problem statement into the goal. Simplification focuses collective energy, reduces decision fatigue, and makes scaling your organization significantly easier. It ensures every individual knows precisely how their actions contribute to larger strategic goals. As a side effect, this is where you can derive your KPIs for projects and initiatives.

When implementing projects, the greatest marker of your success as a BizOps professional is how obvious each next step becomes to anyone joining the initiative. Frame objectives clearly and succinctly:

• Good simplification: “We need to build the cheapest pallets rated for 5,000 lbs.”

• Bad simplification: “We need to figure out the best way to transport our heavy machinery cost-effectively.”

• Good simplification: “We need to build the largest network of doctors without access to basic medical equipment.”

• Bad simplification: “We need to increase medical supply sales to physicians.”

Remember, the dimensions of BizOps are: strategy consulting + execution, gap coverage, generic operations, finance, analytics, and ‘planning.’ Planning is the least important of the BizOps functions; your strategy should cascade into a set of obvious actions, and if you are doing planning sessions you are lacking in the subtlety required for this role.

Do the mental work of boiling the ocean upfront and be rewarded with easier implementation. Handling projects this way—doing the optimization work beforehand—will significantly reduce the effort spent on management or oversight. Figuring out the key metrics for your project will be easy after you do this level of simplification and refinement.

The Trick to Success is Staking Your Reputation

No one will tell you this, but putting your name on an outcome is the most terrifying thing you’ll continually do in your career.

To give you an idea of what leverage BizOps means, it means willingly putting yourself into a position where the decisions you make, if wrong, should get you fired. Even if you execute the decision perfectly, many of the decisions you make cannot be effectively undone, thus, you need a punishment to counterbalance the rewards your position grants (negotiate bonuses, btw, an executive shouldn’t take seriously a BizOps candidate who doesn’t structure the metrics of her bonus).

If you walk into an executive meeting with a plan without a failure condition, you haven’t done your job. Instead, accept that your reputation is your only real leverage, and use it wisely on something you believe could work. Better yet, exhaust all other possibilities to achieve the outcome the executives want and then present the only option. Fear (your own) is a forcing function for doing excellent work if you can harness it. First, build goodwill with solid, data-informed decisions that lean into your instincts, but don’t hide behind them.

Because this role sits between strategy and execution, your signature on a decision means something. A good BizOps professional doesn’t just present ideas—they back them with reputational risk. Over time, that track record cements your credibility, and people will want to work with you on new projects and initiatives. Success breeds success, failure breeds failure, and people know this instinctually. More importantly, if you don’t stake your reputation, you can’t effectively drive a company’s direction. You won’t be seen as a leader with teeth, and you’ll lose the respect of your stakeholders if you are shifty. High-agency BizOps is about leaning into that discomfort and using it to shape outcomes that move the needle.

Humans’ herd psychology prevents normal people from exposing themselves as outside the herd, fortunately, if you can cut it, this will be fun for you. This is what it means to “work with internal and external stakeholders.” it means leading with your hard work and reputation such that other people feel comfortable following and filling in your gaps.

Don’t Use Data As A Crutch

Analysis is generally inversely related to cleverness. No one waits two months to say the punchline to a joke; in much the same way, someone who’s excellent at BizOps knows it is best to strike when the iron is hot. Knowing when to break your own rules and using heuristics as your guide instead of lengthy operations of data gathering and consensus building is what separates the novice from the expert in this domain. Sometimes, a flash of ingenuity and chance now is worth 100 times what a well-thought-out plan could produce at a later date.

In much the same way, with more experience, you’ll begin to understand the shape of problems and solutions more effectively. You aren’t going to optimize from zero new customers. For example, if you have literally zero new sign-ups, the issue runs deeper, and it might be more useful to try something completely new than iterative. Ideally, you’d have some measurements of KPI to go off of in the case of having 0 new customers.

Ultimately, you should use a mix of your past experiences and try to develop datasets and analyses that are relevant to your problem space:

1. Beware of overcomplicating: A small dataset or incomplete metrics can push you into building elaborate analytics pipelines instead of fixing the core problem. If you’re burning cash on tooling that yields tiny improvements, step back from the analysis and solve the issue.

2. Heuristic Sense: With experience, you’ll learn the shape of common startup pitfalls—like linear growth in a supposedly viral product or a month-long stall in a weekly pipeline growth. In those moments, a quick correction or pivot might be 10x more valuable than an analysis.  

3. Cultivate Technical Chops: Ironically, responsibly ignoring data requires understanding it deeply. This will also allow you to quickly understand which pieces of information in the system you are looking at are signal or noise.

You can only break rules after you have cultivated a rigorous background in financial modeling, statistics, calculus, and low-level data science. For beginners, the most important thing they can do is work on their fundamentals (this should be developed in your previous professions rather than on the job). And, truly, nothing feels better than figuring out an optimization problem in an elegant way.

The correct way to develop a sense of which projects require analysis and which ones require action is by doing what makes sense on gut instinct and then writing down what assumptions helped you make a correct or incorrect decision.

Practical Advice for Fixing Bottlenecks

The easiest way to fix your growth/operational problems is to view them as a series of bottlenecks to be eliminated. Bottlenecks require creativity to see and fix properly, but a problem well-stated contains the solution in itself. As a rule, you must properly state the bottleneck:

1. You must not believe any stated problems at face value; find the root cause

   1. People who are in the day-to-day weeds of their jobs are sometimes incapable of seeing past their own efforts

   2. People naturally want to complain in a way that shifts blame to other parties, and they do this unconsciously. If you are empathetic, you will agree and amplify (don’t do this; they’ll feel betrayed if you come to the opposite conclusion later)

   3. More often than not, a person is indirectly the problem

2. Try to isolate problems to their single greatest common factor

   1. You’ll cut through a lot of second-order effect bullshit – for example, if a process-driven person is demanding all changes to his system get routed through him then he is the problem.

   2. Your job is like that of a surgeon removing tumors instead of a doctor treating symptoms.

3. Fixing bottlenecks looks like simplification

   1. The number of times I’ve walked into a 12-step sales and marketing process and changed it to 4 steps is uncountable. The results are always the same.

      1. In these cases, each step allows competent salespeople to navigate their customers dynamically without complicating and confusing the sales process for them and the customer.

   2. For product, it is reducing the number of actions required for the user to get the desired results

   3. For engineering, it is spending time making the developer experience better, simplifying the tech stack and reducing the time to code.

      1. You do not need a pub/sub event-driven, distributed, redundant architecture for 300 customers with 3 separate development environments.

      2. You do not need a built-out dynamically composable, user-defined UI for a single onboarding flow.

      3. You do not need 20 planning meetings before you put lines of code down. You will learn 10 times more by doing than by planning. No plan survives first contact with a solution.

Fixing bottlenecks is like using an iron fist in a velvet glove. The secret, especially the first couple of times you do it at a new org, is to have the CEO or your superior visibly authorize your execution; this legitimacy will smooth over most resistance. The first couple of actions you do at an org will be like riding training wheels, asking for known problems that the CEO or Executive hasn’t had the time to personally solve, and then doing that for them. This allows the shortest path to integration with people at your company; all of these actions should produce results independent of other people’s work.

• Never, ever, ever fire, demote, destroy, or discredit the work of anyone at your new org as one of your first 10 actions. Everyone else will dislike and distrust you afterward, you might as well get a new job. Uplift and share credit as your first project.

Bottlenecks in the form of people are always the most gut-wrenching; BizOps can show which teams or roles contribute directly to revenue, user growth, or mission-critical outcomes. If certain roles don’t map onto the company’s core objectives or are hurting the chances of the business reaching its ideal state, then BizOps highlights the redundancy. If your company doesn’t ‘hire well,’ then you will be a part of ‘firing well.’

1. Identify Structural Problems: Sometimes, a department is performing poorly due to a lack of leadership or outdated methods. BizOps looks at root causes If the real fix is reorganizing leadership, it might be more impactful than firing the entire team, however, it may be cleaner to start fresh if you can mitigate the knock-on effects and fill in the interim gaps.

   1. My advice is to treat every employee optimistically, operating under the assumption that they’ll be retained. Employ objective criteria by which you and the executive you support can decide on their status. for a large enough team cut this can take a couple of months of work.

2. Scenario Planning & Runway Analysis: Firing decisions often come up when you have a limited runway. BizOps outlines how reducing a certain cost center (e.g., an underperforming project) might extend the runway long enough to land critical milestones or funding.

3. Ensuring Decisiveness: Execs sometimes waver on painful headcount decisions. A strong BizOps person calls out the real business risk: “If we don’t cut these costs, we can’t make payroll in three months.” This drives action sooner rather than letting the company bleed out. In the good version of this scenario, you have enough money to give severance and extend healthcare beyond what is normal for our industry.

Any critical gaps a firing causes in the company are your fault. Your job is to understand what is vital to the company before making any of these recommendations. 

Most bottlenecks will be in the form of processes (especially for a lean and well-organized startup team). This is the ideal scenario when everything is going well (enough), and in practice, figuring out process-driven bottlenecks is easier than figuring out people-driven bottlenecks.

• Example: Suppose you need compliance approval from three separate financial institutions before you can publish new marketing material. One approach is to streamline the workflow: batch your approvals together, figure out which bank typically flags which concerns, and give extra diligence to those areas. But you could also solve it in a meta way: create a dictionary of pre-approved marketing language all three institutions agree on. As long as your team sticks to that dictionary, nothing outside it will trigger compliance concerns. If each institution trusts an internal auditor to confirm you’re only using the agreed-upon language, you’ve effectively neutralized the bottleneck at its root.

Between the long stretches of strategy consulting, the interspersed periods of gap coverage, the daily operational tasks & data analysis, and those monthly or quarterly finance reviews, you won’t have the ability to have much else left in your scope. That, in essence, is the job.

Who is BizOps Material?

BizOps typically involves a combination of the following backgrounds/experiences: Big 3 Management Consulting, Hedge Fund Management, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Investment Banking, or Founding a company. These experiences are some of the only positions that help you define a refined taste for strategy and execution. Notice that in all of these professions, the likelihood of failure is extremely high, and thus, each of these professionals must be adapted to wise decision-making and quick implementation. Even being an executive at a Fortune 500 wouldn't necessarily give you a refined sense of strategy if you were only in charge of a single department looking internally.

This is a profession that requires a higher degree of working memory rather than verbal acuity (a mistake often made on job postings) since your ultimate function is to accurately model the world in your mind, come up with a simplification, and derive a solution to a discrete problem. In the age of generative AI, I fear that people will forget that rote memorization allows you to mentally examine and play with an arena of ideas to help you create novel solutions. Having excellent foundational knowledge is key to having a refined sense of taste, a map of solutions to problems, and a system of shortcuts to handle complex business problems.

Generally, BizOps is ideally composed of highly intelligent and mildly disagreeable people who have a taste for strategy and a reductionist approach to fixing issues. Increasingly, there is no excuse for BizOps not to be highly technical themselves, as the issues they deal with are increasingly nuanced and tech-related. Most JDs require SQL competency at a minimum, but you should be able to program & deploy your own database and build data pipelines & workers. This will give you the experience and legitimacy to interact with engineering teams on a deep level without blowing smoke up their ass.

The visible, tertiary concerns of BizOps are the discrete and definable tasks that often make up the bulk of the job description: “make presentations,” “get buy-in from internal and external stakeholders,” “work with {x} department,” “optimize ongoing processes and automation,” “use qualitative and quantitative data for storytelling,” “research root problem causes,” “get stakeholder alignment,” “monitor your ongoing project’s key metrics,” etc. If you can only do these surface-level tasks, you may not get fired, but you’ll never be good.

Conclusion

Practically, BizOps means solving for the ideal outcome of your businesses, figuring out and optimizing for analogous milestones, solving novel problems, getting people to buy into your strategy, getting your hands very dirty (or even bloody), being ridiculously mission-driven, and taking on things proactively and reactively.

Most competent BizOps professionals usually rate highly on conscientiousness and openness due to the discipline requisite for the complexity of their implementation and the mild creativity required in coming up with a solution in the first place. Without this psychology, the job will be very stressful as the bouncing between tasks and diligence requirements will run you down. I’m not sure if this type of person gets ‘enjoyment’ out of doing BizOps; however, these traits (along with a healthy degree of humility) will make them highly capable, and you should discount the success chances of anyone being put into this position who is not like this. The trajectory of these types of BizOps people means they’ll either end up starting their own companies or running their own departments, but eventually, they’ll phase out of BizOps. I’d look for very good schools, engineering backgrounds, and good GPAs, with relevant experience, maybe an MBA, and has done at least 1 extraordinary thing in their life; this is a good shortcut to the personality traits previously described.

In my view, the ideal BizOps candidate would combine hard skills drawn 25% from management consulting, 25% from quantitative research, 30% from engineering, and 20% from financial analysis. In other words, they’d possess roughly that fraction of the mastery held by top professionals who’ve dedicated their careers to each respective field.

I'll follow up with articles for each of these domains from the perspective of BizOps next.

For a very particular type of person (me), this job is extremely entertaining. I rate low on conscientiousness, which means I’m more impulsive and disordered than average, which would normally be a detriment to success, however, I find BizOps more video game-like than other fields, so I can sustain the behaviors required for my success indefinitely. Compared to purer professions like SalesOps, Data Science, EngOps, Software Engineering, Administration, Middle-Management, Compliance, or Finance, which causes me mental pain if I do any of those in isolation for more than 3 weeks. My relationship with work is that the more voluntary stress, the higher the dimensionality of the work, and the higher the cost of failure, the more fun I’m having. “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” I have a psychology built more towards thrill-seeking; thus, I’m unlikely to find an equivalent amount of success in a department after I stand it up. Entrepreneurship and BizOps are two ideal paths for optimizing my enjoyment.

Just as I discount the success of a BizOps employee who isn’t conscientious, open, mildly disagreeable, and mildly extroverted, you can discount my writings on this profession based on my bias. This is how I view the profession and what you can do to be highly impactful in your role or find the right candidate.

** Beware potential BizOps hires who do not demonstrate humility and are unable to articulate a failure of theirs & what they learned from it.

**A warning to organizations looking for their first BizOps hire: Most people become advocates for their own professions (for obvious reasons), but I’m not 100% convinced every startup needs a BizOps hire (especially early on). If you or your co-founders are competent operators and you are growing at a decent clip without any foundation-level issues brewing beneath the surface, then you can probably get away without having operations employees for a bit. However, engineer/PhD-founded teams usually never had the desire to flex BizOps muscles before they started a company, in which case I highly recommend BizOps as an early role.

**A warning to CEOs: a bad BizOps hire—early enough in your company’s life—could kill it. This is a role whose degree of potential impact is multiplicative in either direction, but usually, the downside potential is higher than the upside potential. By comparison, software engineers generally have lower downside risk. Whatever effort you spend trying to find the perfect software engineers, double it for your BizOps hire(s).

Resources

You should probably get decently good at backend engineering, it will further your career growth in ways you cannot anticipate:

Boot.dev – I’d do about 60% of the courses here. 

You should get good at fundamental analysis of companies and financial modeling: Introduction to Investing and Finance - Lesson 1 by Martin Shkreli

• Unironically, Martin Shkreli is one of the few people with a hedge fund pedigree and deep operational experience who shares his knowledge of businesses. Since he manually types in every value into his spreadsheet, he shares what his rationale is for each value; very good modeling.

• I think decent BizOps people have a good penchant for analyzing businesses from the angles of finance, competition, technology, and positioning. It is worth putting the time into becoming an ‘investor’ even if you do 0 trading. This is your ‘endgame’ theory.

  • If you want to download and perform analysis on all SEC filings at scale, I wrote a decent jupyter notebook script to use as a starting point since the EDGAR database API is famously difficult: https://github.com/Bjornbot/SEC_Edgar_Enterprise_SalesOps_Tool 

    • I thought this data/tool could be useful for enterprise sales, but it is probably better for analysts. 

      
      

Basic statistics will save you a lot of time in data exploration and process implementation: https://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics-probability

• More often than not, if you cannot apply basic techniques (linear regression, logistic regression, decision trees) to a complex problem, you haven't simplified it enough.

Once you have your basic statistics down, I’d put a list of your favorite models into a series of Jupyter notebooks, hopefully, you can map the shape of new problems onto old solutions in the future.

Books: 

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future - Peter Thiel 

• I had a copy that was signed by him once, but I gave it away to my first boss, who took a chance on hiring me at his company

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy - Schumpeter

• Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction

The Art of War - Sun Tzu & On War - Carl von Clausewitz

Only the Paranoid Survive & High Output Management - Andy Grove