The Operating Lane
A weekly essay on operations leadership at mid-market companies. Frameworks, audits, and observations from 15 years of scaling businesses. New issue every Tuesday.
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The Manager You Promote Is Not the Manager You Need
Promoting your best IC is the easy part. The transition fails because nobody redesigns what success looks like after the org chart changes.
The Decision You Keep Calling a Data Problem
Most delayed operational decisions aren't waiting on better data. They're waiting on willingness to act with what's already in the room.
The Performance Conversation You've Been Pricing Wrong
Avoiding the hard performance conversation isn't a courage failure. It's a pricing error, and six months of silence has a cost most ops leaders aren't running.
Your process map is lying to you
A framework for auditing the gap between documented process and the work that actually happens.
The Ramp Problem, the $16M Tax, and What Salesforce Didn't Put in the Press Release
Three things ops leaders need to act on this week: why billable ramp math protects margin during scale-up, why most supply chain disruption losses are a governance gap not a vendor problem, and what to do before you buy into the agent-layer products that just landed from Salesforce and Box.
The Fire You Stopped Noticing (And the Structure That Slows You Down)
This week: why slow-burn operational friction is more expensive than the crises you respond to, and why adding process reactively during scale almost always makes alignment worse before it helps.
The System Hasn't Kept Up With the Business
When coordination costs climb, dispatch software underdelivers, and critical knowledge lives in one person's head, the problem isn't your tools, it's that your operating model stopped scaling before you noticed.
You're Multiplying the Wrong Thing
This week's AI headlines call it a 'force multiplier', but for ops-heavy businesses, that's only good news if the force you're multiplying is clean.
The All-in-One Trap and the Stolen Hour: What This Week's AI News Actually Means for Your Operations
Three new AI platforms launched this week promising to automate everything at once — and Goldman Sachs says AI is already saving workers an hour a day. Here's why both headlines should make ops-heavy business owners pause before acting.
AI Said It Would Save You Time. So Why Is Everyone Working More?
New data shows AI is expanding the workweek by 40%, and for ops-heavy businesses, there's a structural reason why speed without process just creates more volume, not less chaos.
Why Most AI Projects Fail Before They Start
The pattern I see in every operations-heavy business that tries to 'add AI' without understanding where it actually fits. And what to do instead.