Casey Winters

The goal of business operations is to not exist.

Most people think being a good leader means handling situations as best you can given the circumstances. Wrong. The right move is often to escalate so someone can help you change the circumstances.

People way under-communicate upward inside companies. Then they complain executives are out of touch — when they're the ones not telling executives what executives need to know.

The best way to coach PMs on presentations isn't to debrief after — it's to prepare before. Role-play the meeting, impersonate each executive, and answer their questions before they're even asked.

Product ops roles are a hack to deal with a functional issue. That's fine — but if the solution is building larger and larger ops teams, you're not fixing the inefficiency, you're exacerbating it.

Executive communication is about finding the last point in your story that's completely obvious to your audience — and starting there. Don't start on chapter 6, but don't re-explain things everyone already knows either.