Using Feedback to Forge Your COO Roadmap

The Operations Roadmap

Getting results as a COO will often come down to how well you build processes and how effectively you can create coordination between teams. One of the most powerful tools available to you is an organized, up-to-date operations roadmap with high levels of buy-in across the company. 

This third article in my ongoing series for new COOs is a pragmatic overview of what operations roadmaps look like, how they’re built, and how they can be used to keep the organization on track. Advice for new executives is often vague, aspirational, or overly conceptual, and those transitioning into a C-Suite position for the first time—or growing into the role from an adjacent one like Chief of Staff—have much gain from actionable guidance that can help them find their feet. That’s what I aim to do here. 

First, we need to separate the “what” from the “how” of company leadership. What the company is trying to accomplish is up to the CEO, who sets commercial targets and high-level strategy. The COO has tremendous autonomy in translating that strategy into day-to-day action. Your core responsibility is to ensure that commercial targets are achieved, and what makes a great COO is the ability to understand, monitor, and quickly adjust the company’s means of doing so. That “how we do it” question is at the heart of the COO role.  

Your operations roadmap is your current set of explicit, fully articulated goals for improving the company’s “how”—its processes, systems, tools, reporting, communication, and more. The roadmap should cover both near-term and long-term initiatives, and while it serves an important organizing function, it also has two other vital benefits. One is that it’s a tangible guide/discussion piece for conversations with stakeholders (CEO, executive team, broader company, Board of Directors). The other is that the act of building your roadmap forces you to clearly articulate each problem you’re trying to solve.

Here’s an example. Imagine that you notice a pattern in weekly executive team meetings: people aren’t speaking up, even when their feedback is solicited. Instead, the candid input is coming through 1:1s, where it’s less valuable. That gives you a problem to solve—people need to share their feedback in group settings to create peer alignment and bring diverse perspectives to bear on each new challenge. Your next step is to update the roadmap with an outcome that solves the problem. The outcome needs to be ready for stakeholder review, so it should be precise and measurable. In this case you might write, “During team meetings, each executive expands on or argues against each strategic topic.” That gives me something I can track and observe—whether each executive spoke up or not—so I’ll know when the desired change has been made. 

From there you can think about your approach to getting it done. You might create more psychological safety in the meeting to allow people to disagree, or quiet the loudest voices to make more space for others, or evolve the meeting format so participants receive materials far enough in advance to gather their thoughts. After implementing each tactic, solicit candid feedback to measure which solution is working best. Stay flexible—no solution is one-size-fits-all, and what works now or worked in the past might not do the trick next time around. 

That brings me to the first of two areas of practical advice: how to leverage detailed, consistent feedback to build your roadmap. 

Building the Dashboard: Feedback Is the Path

It will be tempting, especially as you get started in the role, to rely on your own intuition and judgment. That’s a mistake. Fundamentally, the operations roadmap should be defined by reliable input from the people in your organization, at every level, whose job it is to execute. 

Gathering that feedback should start during onboarding. Conduct a listening tour and learn as much as you can about what’s working, what isn’t, and where stakeholders think the company needs to spend more time or allocate more resources. This is equally important for COOs new to the company and those moving up after years in other roles; treat the new job as an opportunity to get fresh, candid perspectives from your colleagues. Ask where they hope you will focus and how they will measure your impact. Listen for patterns, and document what you hear so that, in the future, you can look back and check whether a seemingly one-off problem was actually the first data point in a trend. 

(For more on getting started, refer to my article on balancing responsibilities with your CEO.)

After onboarding, turn your attention to establishing systems for continuous feedback. As I described at the start of this series, you should schedule your 1:1s as followups to key meetings so you can assess which messages are landing in group settings. Communication is a two-way street: if the desired message isn’t landing, you need to change your approach until it does. 

In parallel, pre-schedule retros into your calendar to establish a culture of continuous feedback, both good and bad. Building a culture with regular retrospective feedback sessions gives you eyes on operations at every level. Great retros will codify what’s working well while also encouraging everyone to suggest ways around new barriers or blocks. 

Other tools should bolster those direct forms of contact. Work with your People team to implement engagement surveys that can be filtered by level, department, and other variables. Keep track of which questions get you the most actionable, insightful replies. 

“One of the key elements of highly effective leadership is the refusal to believe that a business model, however sound and well crafted, is ever good enough to run on autopilot. The fact is nothing is ever truly fixed, finished, or completed because every aspect of business is a work in progress. Recognizing this, the most successful leaders continually improve their models by engaging in a perpetual process of interactive learning.” – Mark Stevens, Extreme Management

Over time, work toward an integrated operations roadmap across the organization. Your goal is to build partnerships across operational teams, regardless of formal reporting structure. In my case, the current pillars of our integrated model are People, Finance, Legal, Compliance, and Operations. Team leads meet weekly to prevent redundancy and miscommunication across other meetings, and we maintain a unified cross-team roadmap displaying our highest priorities alongside important issues that pop up. 

That integration is vital. We call our cross-team roadmap meeting the “Braintrust,” and it’s one of our favorite parts of the week. We all rely on its diverse collection of perspectives to help tackle our thorniest problems, and the practice with collaborative problem-solving means we all get better at thinking cross-functionally even when working alone. 

Of course, the roadmap helps with coordination outside of meetings, too. Each team can see other departments’ Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for each quarter, and have a clear vision of the timeline for essential keep-the-lights-on projects or unexpected fire drills. If Finance has an audit that requires input from other teams, those teams need to be ready in advance. If Operations needs to define company-wide goals, they’ll need access to input and data from other departments. 

You sit at the top of the integrated roadmap system. Bring issues to the CEO only as needed, within the framework of your existing system for CEO–COO coordination. 

Speaking of which…

Using the Dashboard: OKRs and Integration

My persistent OKR as COO is always some version of “No Performance Surprises.” I know I’m achieving it when the executive team, including my CEO, reports that the right information is being communicated at the right cadence to let them course-correct in response to performance issues as they come up. 

The week-to-week maintenance of that standard will vary. Sometimes you’ll focus on setting up reporting around a new initiative. Or you might pressure-test current reporting mechanisms, evaluating how accurately they diagnose operational issues and how far in advance they alert you to outperformance issues. And sometimes you’ll be surprised by major stumbles, which means you need to go back to the drawing board with new leading indicators. 

You’ll continuously experiment to get the cadence and information right, and you’ll relentlessly pursue automation in reporting systems. That doesn’t always mean new dashboards or business intelligence tools. Sometimes it’s a question of how meetings are run or how data are presented; a practice of reporting data once and presenting it multiple times can lead to less time spent building reports and more time spent using those data to move the business forward. Find what works well for your least-involved stakeholders (likely your Board of Directors) and use those reports elsewhere, layering in more detailed information as needed.

Other repeating processes will need the same treatment. Consider where added operational attention can improve efficiency or reliability. Ask yourself three key questions: 

  1. Which processes are most fragile? 

    • Example: what grinds to a halt when someone is on PTO?

    • Example: where have the most disruptive fire drills originated?

  2. Which processes are bottlenecks? 

    • Example: turnaround time for calls with prospects. If it’s two days now, how can you bring it down to two hours? 

    • Example: contracting. If you could cut redlining turnaround in half, what difference would that make for deal-closings?

  3. Which processes are most resource-intensive? 

Start with cases where you, as COO, will need to get involved. 

Those are the essential elements of building and using an effective operations roadmap. As a closing note—and before I get to recommendations for supporting reading—remember that the roadmap doesn’t work like a dashboard that can be built and left alone. It’s a never-ending cycle of collecting feedback, setting outcomes, implementing solutions, measuring impact, and then doing it all again, iterating and innovating as you go. Good luck!

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Alicia DiamondCOO