Biz Ops Con 2017

This week, I attended Biz Ops Con 2017 hosted by NerdWallet, Twitch, and Rubrik. It was a very interesting event and the first conference I have been to that focuses solely on Business Operations. The conference was mostly organized as panel discussions, which are always very insightful because you get to hear personal insight and experience first hand.

The event started with a keynote panel. Then, there were about five break out sessions:

• People Ops
• Going International
• Bizops and Finance
• Sales Strategy
• Starting a BizOps Team

Points from the keynote panel:

What Business Operations is all about:

• How to turn idea or technology into a business
• Everything outside of core product and technology
• Jack of all trades, chief therapist, master of jedi mind tricks
• Ensure everyone works well together solving biggest challenges
• Managing goals and objectives and setting the process. One team reported their goals in karaoke form so it’s easy for people to remember (very creative)

Talent Strategy

• Often overlooked as part of business and focus in on hiring and throwing bodies because so much to do
• Need to focus on onboarding, relationship building, and intentional hiring
• Build organization structure and model for now, tomorrow, and long term to balance for change

Career Advice

• Don’t let function and title matter if you are learning, doing meaningful work with great people
• Learn and focus a lot on customer and product (transferable skills to any function)
• Full stack employee (resource recommendation)
• Communication and problem solving are the top skills in business operations
• Build a strong relationship with an executive recruiter
• Show impact quickly, but take time to get to know people
• Use quick wins to show people how you operate
• Take on a back burner important messy project that people will appreciate and the organization needs
• Build a 90 day plan of what you are going to do as people may be skeptical when you are first business ops hire, so set and share goals and objectives and be transparent about updates
• Usually first business ops hire is at about 50–100 people and mostly has hybrid role with finance/G&A

Key points from the breakout session: ‘Starting a BizOps Team’

• Business operations servces a source of truth for company and performance management (Goals, OKRs, KPIs, etc.) for company
• Business operations fill gaps and is the connective tissue. Also are like internal consultants
• When you have a good business operations team, people will pull you into places and you have to identify opportunities, so it’s important to build and gain that reputation in the company
• When no one else can do it, it falls on Business Operations
• Business Operations can go two ways: Embedded Ops Teams or Special Projects Based
• Find champions outside of your boss
• Focus on bigger picture things and keep a scorecard for the big picture items
• Always attend all planning session, executive offsites, etc. for better knowledge sharing