Operations with Sean Lane

It's annual planning time, so we decided to throw it back to one of our earliest episodes all about the annual planning process at Salesforce.com. On this episode of Operations, Sean goes back in time – to 2012, to be exact – when special guest Bala Balabaskaran first joined Salesforce as Vice President of Go to Market Technology and Operations. At the time, Salesforce was a $2 billion dollar star...

It’s that time of year when everyone is taking stock of what they accomplished (and didn't accomplish) this year, and we are all in the midst of setting our goals for next year. Luckily, self-proclaimed goals nerd Karen Borchert, the COO of Flywheel, is here to help. In this conversation with Karen, we go deep on the goal-setting framework she uses at Flywheel, the special quadrant she has built t...

Imagine you had access to data points on the way dozens of companies operate – instead of just the one you work at. You’d get to see patterns in what works and what doesn’t. Talk about an unfair advantage! Now imagine getting to do that through a purely Operational lens with companies in hypergrowth – how much more dangerous would you be in your role? That’s exactly what this week’s guest, Jason R...

You hear a lot about serial entrepreneurs. But in this Operations episode, Sean sits down with a serial operator. Heidi Rawding is the Senior Director of Operations at RapidMiner and has been hired as the first ops person at three different companies. Meaning she's gone through hypergrowth and has built the foundation for an ops organization three different times. Heidi talks about what it's like...

Ian Mesey spent years in consulting until he made the switch to the practitioner side...and landed smack in the middle of a company in hypergrowth as Head of Revenue Operations at Bloomreach. In this episode, Sean and Ian talk about operational debt, the value of unsexy projects (like governance), and his unique approach to problem-solving.

Imagine you are inviting a friend to a party. You call them up, tell them all of these amazing things about the party, and then immediately hang up before you tell them how to get there or when it is. This isn’t far off from the way some people approach marketing email today. That’s where Siftrock comes in. In this week’s episode, Sean takes you inside Drift’s own operations team with Drift’s VP o...

How much time are you spending thinking strategically about the talent on your team? If you’re Maribel Olvera (SVP, Operations at The Predictive Index), then the answer is pretty much all the time. PI is a company that specializes in how you can tie your talent strategy to your corporate strategy (and the 17 unique reference profiles that they’ve created to help the rest of us do it too). About fo...

On this episode of Operations, Sean interviews a post-sale ops pro focused on customer operations. Together they talk about the direct impact operations can have on the customer experience. A lot of hypergrowth companies focus on short term wins versus long term gains. But for Cole Schofield, Gusto's Head of Customer Experience, that just won't cut it. Because short term wins never justify the lon...

On this episode of Operations, Sean interviews Michelle Palleschi, the COO of Sendoso, the world's first sending platform. Because, as Michelle puts it, sending stuff is hard. But that kind of complexity is what Michelle lives for – she previously worked in finance at Cisco and Apple. Ever wonder how Apple forecasts new product launches? Well, re-engineering that process was Michelle's job. She sh...

On this episode of #Operations, host Sean Lane talks with Auvik Network's CMO, Jacqui Murphy. Jacqui and Sean talk about how she's scaled from a marketing team of one to now oversee marketing and business development teams totaling more than 50 people. Plus, why she's banished vanity metrics for good, her belief that the magic comes from the people on her teams – not just the data and much more. T...

On this episode of #Operations, host Sean Lane sits down with VC and former Salesforce EVP and GM, Brett Queener. Queener joined the company when it was at $11 million in revenue. Today, Salesforce's market cap stands at $123 billion. This monumental growth is due in large part to Queener's focus on specialization and segmentation – essential for the success of any ops pro.

Today on #Operations, host Sean Lane sits down with Okta's VP of Business Operations, Jake Randall. Okta's market cap is now $9 billion...not a bad company to learn from. Together Sean and Jake discuss how to actually measure your ops team's performance, scaling through hypergrowth, Jake's career path at Okta, what he's reading now and much more.

On the very first official episode of #Operations, host Sean Lane sits down with Will Collins, VP of Operations at Drift. Together they look inward to focus on operations at Drift – Will was employee number 13. So what exactly does it mean to work in ops at a hypergrowth company? You'll find out in this episode.

On this episode of Operations, Sean goes back in time – to 2012, to be exact – when special guest Bala Balabaskaran first joined Salesforce as Vice President of Go to Market Technology and Operations. At the time, Salesforce was a $2 billion dollar startup going through hypergrowth. Sean and Bala talk about Salesforce's operating model and what it was like to be in charge of the go to market plann...

On this episode of Operations, Sean meets with Sylvia Kainz, VP of Global Revenue Operations at Eventbrite. Sylvia joined Eventbrite when the company was 12 years into its existence and on the brink of going public– and was tasked with creating a RevOps team from scratch. No small feat. Sylvia shares what that experience was like and what she learned from it, as well as her definition for RevOps,...

What does it mean to be a COO at a hypergrowth company? A valid question for sure, but if you ask 10 people the same question, chances are you'll end up with 10 different answers. To find out why the COO role is so misunderstood, Sean talks to J Zac Stein – COO of Lattice. In this episode, Sean and J Zac cover everything from what being a COO means to him, the relationship between a CEO and a COO,...

These days, the market is exploding with tools aimed at operations teams. So on this episode of Operations, Sean sits down with Marko Savic, the co-founder and CEO of FunnelCake, to find out what’s behind the surge and explore how one of those products came to be. You see, Marko is building a product that is meant to help Ops and Go-To-Market teams be better as they go through hypergrowth...all wh...

On this episode of Operations, Sean explores a common trap that Ops teams fall into. And spoiler alert – it’s not what you think. Listen to the full episode to learn what the trap is, how and why Ops teams fall into it, and four actions you can take today (and every day) to make sure you don’t get stuck in the trap.

On this episode of Operations, Sean chats with Kyle Morris about his unique path into ops. Kyle was an Army Ranger for four years before making his way to Silicon Valley, where he started his career in sales and eventually found his way into operations. Now Kyle is the founder of SifData and Kicksaw. Together Sean and Kyle cover everything from how Kyle fell into ops, why operations people should...

A scale-up is typically a company that has found product-market fit, has created more specialized roles within an organization and is in the process of building a repeatable, predictable machine for growth. And while there are tons of books, webinars, conferences, and coaches dedicated to this concept – it’s a whole other story when you get a chance to talk to someone who’s actually in the middle...