Ask HN: What Is a COO?
Throughout my career I've held exclusively engineering positions. However, I've noticed the parts of my work I enjoy the most aren't necessarily the technical challenges, but instead improvements to process and productivity.
My favourite books are 'Getting Things Done' [0], and 'Deep Work' [1]. I also consistently try to find improvements to communication, requirement clarification, and decision making.
Is this mindset aligned with what would be expected from a COO? I know virtually nothing about the position apart from a line that stuck with me (paraphrased): 'A COO is similar to a CEO, where they have to do the same amount of work but don't get to make any of the decisions'.
Do you have any insights or books/article recommendations for what the role of COO looks like? It would be greatly appreciated
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1633.Getting_Things_Done [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25744928-deep-work
66 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadA good COO will be almost invisible. The company is firing on all cylinders, departments interact with one another smoothly, everyone is getting what they need…. and the COO is behind the scenes making it all work.
There’s a great article[0] about Tim Cook from his days as Apple’s COO that delves into some of the behind-the-scenes problems he worked on at the time and that Jobs likely wouldn’t have had the time and/or skill set to fix.
0 - https://money.cnn.com/2008/11/09/technology/cook_apple.fortu...
The role responsibilities are nebulous and change based on the company, but can generally be described as "whatever is necessary for the business to run". That could mean they focus on running Sales, Marketing, Support, Customer Success, but they could also oversee Operations and in some cases Product.
I know even less. What’s the O?
On the other hand, I've seen BAs and PMs do the kinds of things you describe, along with plenty of engineers. I've also seen people doing those things who have vague made-up titles unique to the org. In some cases, they were hired for something else, but then ended up what they were good at, and instead advised company leadership.
All of which is to say: if you're looking for a career where you can do more of that kind of thing, you might do better focusing on organizations rather than titles.
The scope of their job can be everything from ensuring that the office windows get cleaned regularly, to working on a hyperspecific project as a fixer, to overseeing large parts of business strategy that the CEO does not have time or expertise for, to effectively waiting/in training to be a successor to the CEO.
“He basically explained nicely that my job was to do the things that Mark (Zuckerberg) did not want to focus on as much,” Sandberg said of the 2007 meeting that lasted several hours with the Chief Operating Officer of Apple Inc.
“That was his job with Steve (Jobs). And he explained that the job would change over time and I should be prepared for that.”
If you are the CTO and have a VPE, the VP typically tends to focus inwards, while the CTO has the luxury to care more about outwards topics - strategy, vision, investor relations, business relations etc. The VP focuses on processes, projects, coding standards etc.
It's similar between CEO and COO. If you have a COO you trust, as a CEO you can focus much more outwards about high level issues (strategy, investors, business partners etc). The COO makes sure that the business runs smoothly (hiring, processes, quality of service etc).
It’s mostly a bifurcation of strategy and execution. The CEO is forward looking and COO is focused on the day to day. Making sure all teams and processes are running smoothly. Helping determine which investments have a high priority, etc. The COO is still very involved in the strategy as well. Because they’ll eventually need to operationalize it.
Pretty much every C level role that gets added as a company grows is to pull away some domain specific stuff from the CEO. The CEO could do it all in theory. COO is usually one of the later additions to the C suite during growth as it usually has a lot of overlap with CEO.
Different strokes for different folks.
Odd, those are all CEO responsibilities, not CTO ones.
As a CTO you will spend time preparing board meetings, OKR discussions, be part of strategy offsites, handle audits, have stakeholder meetings (CPO, COO, HR), have a part in Allhands, talk to vendors and business partners and of course handle all internal crisises that are escalated to you.
It's definitely a more messy and political work environment that you should take into account when leaving the IC track.
"Looking towards the future" and "business optimization" are more squishy, and you can't really specifically disprove that someone's doing them on an ongoing basis. But you can often disprove it retrospectively, if you see that the business is run increasingly poorly or clearly failed to account for some big new trend.
console.log(`${dog} gets ${food}`);
dog = 'coo'; food = 'what ceo doesn\'t wanna do';
console.log(`${dog} gets ${food}`);
"What the king dreams, the hand of the king builds...or so say the kings the hands and the lords who wish to be hands."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59F_ntoGHDI
I think of Operations from technology perspective - datacentre and servers and SRE and ITIL; processes like release / incident / problem management.
In many other businesses, Operations/COO is much more focused on business finances, supply chain, paying the bills, accounting, etc.
From that experience, while I too would love to have better understanding and will read this thread eagerly, I think we all need to be careful to "domain scope manage" it.
Writing code is fun, building stuff is fun. Handling tax stuff, invoicing, managing office space and connecting various departments is a major PITA.