Jeff Cangialosi

A friend recently asked me what would be some key considerations when crafting a new business operations role at their company. I’ve had the chance to work in a range of operations and chief of staff roles at startups over the years. The classic “jack-of-all trades” type roles. With a role that can often be extremely nebulous and hard to define, it’s critical to set hiring criteria and expectations clearly upfront.

As you write up your next job description to hire a Chief of Staff, Operations Manager, or Director of Business Operations, give these questions some thought.

What functions do you want this person to contribute to?

• I tend to think there are two broad categories of BizOps roles (GTM BizOps vs. Universal BizOps)
  • GTM BizOps is really close to Sales Operations and is more focused on building processes around the GTM motion. These types of roles probably make sense a bit later on when the team is 20+ people.
  • Universal BizOps roles tend to still have to handle the GTM responsibilities (shared with the CEO), but they are also handling HR and more true operations work.
• In my role at Loop Crypto (a seed-stage startup), I touch Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, HR, and Finance. At a later stage company, that purview would obviously narrow.  

Is there a function where you want the person to be particularly strong?

• For example, if GTM is already being covered by other individuals then you might want to focus on someone who has more experience with HR, Finance, Legal, etc.
• We can often fall into the trap of thinking “business people” are universal, but that’s not the case. Even your management consultant and investment banker turned startup operator are each going to have different strengths. Ensure that you’re hiring the profile for the strengths you are missing.

How much administrative work will the person be required to do? Is the person you’re hiring clear about the administrative work involved and comfortable with it?

• If applicable, make sure the person is comfortable with the unsexy parts of the job (like setting up a mail service, ordering office snacks, coordinating vacation calendars, etc.).
• Some people may say they are game for a jack-of-all-trades role, but they really want to just do Sales Operations and not really get into the weeds of other functions.

Is the person comfortable with a solo, execution-focused role? Are they looking to manage a team or want to be an individual contributor?

• This could dictate if you want to frame the role as a Chief of Staff vs. BizOps role. In reality, there is not a ton of difference, and startup titles are fairly meaningless, but I think it’s more about expectation-setting.
• Is this a long-term solo-execution role or will it evolve into a role that manages others while building out a team?

How much web3 experience is required?

• If this person is going to have a role in the financial management of the company, do they need to have a sense of how different wallets work and best practices for setting up a wallet management system for a company?
• Learning how to navigate web3 is not rocket science, but it can be a 3+ month ramp up for even the smartest of BizOps folks. During the interview process, you will want to dig into whether the person has actually played around in the web3 ecosystem or has just read a few articles about web3 on Coindesk.

Bonus content

I also want to include a little bonus material that may help you in scoping out this role and assessing candidates. When I started at Loop Crypto, I made an Areas of Responsibilities (AORs) chart, that our CEO and I went through to map out who would handle which components of the business work within Loop. You can of course iterate on this framework and have various permutations, but particularly at a small startup, it’s crtitical to divide and conquer allowing individuals to lean into their particular strengths.

In the table below, you can see that I mapped out on a scale of 1 to 10 how much experience and passion to do the work I had in each bucket of potential BizOps work. Our CEO did the same. This then gave us a starting point for thinking about dividing and conquering.