The Operator’s Handbook

Introduction

The Operator’s Handbook is your guide to accelerating your career as a professional in BizOps, Strategy, a Chief of Staff role, RevOps, or any other operations function. This document empowers aspiring Operators with the knowledge and tools they need to succeed. It covers a wide range of topics, including process documentation, analytics implementation, performance monitoring, issue identification and prioritization, solution development, and execution. 

Whether you're thinking about a career in Business Operations, Revenue Operations, Financial Operations, or another of the many Ops disciplines, this guidebook will provide invaluable insights and practical advice to help you choose a path and excel in your Ops career.

About Operators

Operators exists to empower operations professionals to excel in their work by connecting them with a supportive community, offering engaging coursework and guides, providing access to job opportunities, and discounts for popular tools.

We manage two communities for Strategy & Ops professionals, the Chief of Staff Network and the BizOps Network. We also run the popular OpsJobs newsletter that goes out to tens of thousands of subscribers every week.

We exist to help you navigate your career in Ops & Strategy. As a starting point, we recommend you take this assessment once you’re done reading the Handbook to determine which Ops functions might be the best fit for you.

Stay tuned for our longer format course that will discuss the ideas presented here in much greater detail, with actionable steps and peer- and expert-support to help you get into the role you want.

The Optimization Process

The core focus of this guide is to teach you about the common Optimization Process that all Operators use as the backbone of how they get work done and improve the firms they work in:

1. Shadow and document processes
2. Set up tracking & analytics
3. Review metrics on a regular cadence
4. Find & prioritize issues
5. Identify & recommend solutions
6. Execute your solution

We’ll go through each of these steps with examples and then talk through the various sub-disciplines of Operations, covering salary, number of roles, exit paths, and more.

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