An Operational Diagnosis, Written as a Solution

This is written as a job description, but it isn't a vacancy. It's a diagnosis of why growing businesses fail operationally, expressed as the role that would counter it. Read it as commentary on what's missing.

If you work deep in a single function, the problem it describes may never have crossed your desk. It lives between functions, not inside them. But if you sit on a leadership team, the areas this role would address and prioritise should read like a list of your recurring pains. And as businesses scale and run more of their work through technology, those gaps between functions stop being occasional friction and become the main source of failure.

Director of Business Operations 

London Area, United Kingdom, 1 Day Ago

Actively reviewing opportunities 

As the business continues to scale and parts transform, we need someone who sees across the entire company and produces the ground truth leadership needs to act on. The role exists to counter the operational debt that builds quietly inside any growing business: the processes that no longer fit, the dependencies that go unmapped, the issues that go unresolved because they sit between functions. The work is to diagnose, design, and where needed transform or retire, balancing priorities across functions to keep the business aligned and working as one system. 

The Role

This is a senior cross-functional problem solving role with a wide remit. The day to day will vary; the work itself is consistent. The role has a large amount of autonomy and delegated authority in order to produce the ground truth for leadership.

• Ensure efficiency and alignment by designing end to end processes built around core operating models with modular bolt-ons, simplifying where possible and creating space for automation, consistency, and resource redundancy.
• Diagnose structural issues across the business, identifying where current processes are failing or about to fail under scale or change, and surfacing new opportunities where they appear.
• Incident response: lead the structural diagnosis when things go wrong, with the relevant teams. Identify root causes and facilitate resolutions. No issue goes unresolved. 
• Ensure business reporting produces signal not noise, with insights that are meaningful and actionable.
• Facilitate new products, services, or verticals to integrate with the existing operating architecture, standardising elements and purposely building bolt-on modules for others for greatest business fit. 
• Work across the senior team and operating functions to align on priority, sequence, and trade-offs, surfacing the dependencies, bottlenecks and misalignment issues that single-function leaders cannot see from inside their remit.
• Develop emerging leaders to understand the business end to end and how its functions depend on each other.

Requirements 

• Demonstrate a track record of operating in a variety of environments and functions in leadership roles. Ideally with experience of designing processes in early stage start-ups and redesigning processes in large businesses.
• Evidence of working within complexity, balancing priorities in multi-stream or multi-stakeholder businesses, creating sense from chaos.
• Experience designing and implementing operating models, processes, new products, or governance structures from scratch, or in turnaround or transformation environments.
• Comfort operating with high autonomy and ambiguity. While obvious issues will be raised, curiosity and a default to first principles will surface underlying issues and more complete diagnosis.
• Strong communication across the business, from reporting to leadership and the board through to speaking with our core teams to get the ground truth and insights. Able to translate technical, operational, and commercial perspectives into shared language without losing substance.
• Track record of developing emerging leaders, particularly in helping them transition from strong functional performance to understanding how their function fits the whole, and the principles behind business decisions.

What this is actually describing

Strip the format away and this is an argument about coordination, the function nobody owns. Most businesses don't ignore it; they do something worse. They distribute it. Every leader gets a slice of the coordinating to do alongside their real job, and because everyone holds a piece, none of it comes together. Coordination by everyone is coordination by no one.

The second failure follows from the first. When no one owns the whole, everything gets built to optimise its own part. Each function makes locally sensible decisions, and the sum of locally sensible decisions is a system that fights itself. A business optimised part by part is not an optimised business.

The counter to both runs through the role above. A core operating model that everything shares, with modular bolt-ons for the genuine exceptions, so things are built to fit together rather than retrofitted after they collide. And ruthless prioritisation of effort: the small number of structural issues that drive most of the failure get solved first, properly, before anything else is touched.

Almost no growing business has this role. The work sits scattered across a COO's margins, a transformation programme, or nobody. That gap is why the same failures recur. Not because the problems are hard to solve, but because they are hard to see from inside any single function. The job description is the diagnosis.

So what?

If you sit on a leadership team, run one test. List the issues that have recurred over the last year despite being "fixed". Then ask, for each one, which single person owned the whole problem rather than a function's slice of it. If the answer keeps coming back as nobody, you have found the gap this role fills.

What to do with that is a choice with three honest options. Give the work to someone as their actual job, not a margin of an existing one. Build the discipline into how you operate, a shared core, modular exceptions, and a named owner for everything that crosses functions. Or accept the cost knowingly, which is at least better than paying it by accident.

What does not work is the default: distributing coordination in slices and assuming it adds up. It has not so far. It will not as you scale.

Whats next?

We look a few years into the futrue at a world of AI augmented business.

https://karl-eastwood.ghost.io/an-operational-forecast-written-as-the-solution/