The Floating Function

It’s 4 PM on a Tuesday, same spreadsheet, third argument of the week. One tab says 182 customers, another says 174. Sales swears the growth is real. Finance swears the miss is real. Both are right. Both can prove it. Someone has to decide which version the board will see. That someone: me.

This is BizOps at its most ordinary: not strategy decks, not sweeping reorganizations, but deciding whose math holds when numbers don’t line up. The work is mostly quiet calibration. If left undone, the gaps widen fast.

BizOps almost never shows up as a neat box on the org chart. Sometimes it’s tucked under Finance, sometimes a direct line to the CEO, sometimes scattered like dandelion seeds across teams. Ask five people what BizOps is and you’ll get five versions: a strike team, duct tape, a consulting arm, the CEO’s right hand. None of them wrong. None quite right either.

The Unglamorous Reality

A CEO asks: “If growth slows, what’s our real runway?” Simple on the surface, but the inputs scatter like marbles across the floor. Burn rate in NetSuite. Headcount plan in Greenhouse. Forecasts in Salesforce and half a dozen spreadsheets. Retention signals hidden in Jira tickets and product dashboards. Every number means something slightly different depending on who says it.

“Headcount,” for example: Finance means anyone on payroll. HR means approved roles. Engineering means who can ship code this month. You can’t move forward until you’ve untangled which version you’re answering.

So you build a bridge. Not a beautiful bridge, not one that will last forever — just one strong enough to carry the weight of a board meeting. Then next quarter, you build it again, slightly better. This is the rhythm: not glamour, not permanence, but scaffolding sturdy enough for the next decision.

Ground Control

From the outside, it can look like strategy. Inside, it’s closer to triage with spreadsheets. Every model is less about the math and more about forcing a conversation people don’t want to have.

Monday: the headcount model says we can’t hire fast enough to hit the plan. Three different versions, none of them good. So you make the tradeoffs visible: what gets cut, delayed, outsourced. The model itself isn’t the point — it’s the forcing function.

Wednesday: pricing exceptions are clogging the system. Sales wants freedom, Finance wants control, Legal wants to sleep at night. So you map the last quarter of deals and show which patterns cover most cases. Imperfect, but better than CEO sign‑off on every contract.

Friday: three different customer counts floating around. Marketing counts anyone who logged in once. Product, monthly actives. Finance, paying accounts. You spend a day in SQL, then propose one definition. Not the perfect one, just the one everyone can use without building a parallel version.

The pattern repeats: step into ambiguity, pull the threads together, make the invisible tradeoffs visible, and do it before the window closes.

Where BizOps Lands

BizOps doesn’t keep these forever. It either hands them off once they’re stable, or keeps them until they no longer need active management.

What It Really Takes

You need enough SQL to catch when a dashboard is lying. Enough accounting to spot when margin math is off. Enough sales knowledge to know why a contract structure breaks comp. Enough engineering context to know a “small change” can take three quarters. But technical fluency only gets you in the room. What matters is knowing who makes the real call, who needs to be heard first, who will nod in the meeting then quietly resist later.

The work is persuasion by detail. Not abstract frameworks, but knowing when Tuesday’s good‑enough answer is better than waiting for Friday’s perfect one.

Why Companies Create BizOps

Most don’t set out to. It emerges in the gaps — the plan that never lands, the three forecasts that never match, the projects no one owns. Eventually someone starts closing those gaps, often without the title. That’s the seed.

Without it, companies drift. Sales assumes one future, Finance another. Product ships against timelines no one believes. Plans and reality diverge until no one trusts the process at all. BizOps doesn’t erase chaos. It just prevents the same chaos from happening twice.

Who BizOps Reports To

Reporting line matters less than three things: air cover to tackle cross‑functional messes, discipline not to become the junk drawer, and access to decisions before they calcify.

How It Fails

BizOps rarely blows up. It erodes.

• The junk drawer problem. One week you’re reconciling CAC, the next you’re planning the holiday party. The signal gets drowned in noise.
• Models no one uses. Forecasts that assume pipeline hygiene that never exists. Capacity plans that ignore on‑call. Correct, irrelevant.
• Leadership access without team trust. You’re in the exec meeting but ignored by the managers doing the work. Authority without credibility.

The symptoms are quiet: shadow forecasts in Google Sheets, teams keeping side roadmaps, board decks with parallel versions. Workarounds multiply until no one trusts the official process at all.

How It Succeeds

The clearest signal is language. When people stop asking, “What does BizOps want?” and start saying, “Based on our model…” That shift is quiet, but it means the work has been absorbed into the company’s bloodstream. It’s no longer yours. It’s theirs.

Like this? Subscribe via email here.