Operational Excellence Lead

Location: Remote, New York City, or Oakland, CA Role Type: Full-time Compensation: $135,000 or $155,000, depending on seniority Reports to: Chief Administrative Officer Visa sponsorship: Not available Hires remotely in: United States - About the Role The Operational Excellence Lead will connect the organization's long-horizon, cross-functional, and external-facing strategy with internal execution. They will build the operating cadence, information flow, and forums that let the organization run performance-versus-plan at every level, and own the follow-through that keeps decisions and strategy connected across altitudes. What Success Looks Like • Leaders know where and why core impact metrics are moving, and how to intervene. • Forums at every altitude (team level, functional leads, leads review) run with clear owners, decisions, and metrics. • Operational systems drive high-quality, consistent reporting and better decision-making. • Resourcing decisions are data-driven, and ROI is tracked over time. Key Responsibilities Organizational Strategy & Operating Cadence Own the connective layer between long-term vision and strategy, and functional leads' near-term execution. • Run performance-versus-plan and OKR processes across the organization, working with leads to define outcomes, metrics, and reporting cadence. Own core planning cycles (e.g., H2 planning) end to end — the calendar, the templates, and the cross-team dependencies. • Consolidate fragmented ownership, and make ownership, decision-making, and escalation paths explicit. • Facilitate cross-functional reviews that ladder up into organizational strategy; ask sharp questions, capture action items with clear owners and dates, and enforce time-boxing so discussions actually converge. • Communicate internally about our impact metric progress by owning the Impact Monthl y meeting: build the update deck, and work with teams across the org to source the case studies and highlights that make it concrete. • Partner with the Director of Talent to create org-wide communications calendar and content based on critical happenings. Data & Financial Analysis Ensures the organization has trustworthy, accessible data to run performance-versus-plan, understand unit economics and make resourcing decisions. • Support the business case for strategic initiatives such as headcount requests, RFPs, or resourcing requests — making the value proposition clear and concrete using business cases, OKRs, or other appropriate value frameworks — before they're resourced. • Pull and build your own analyses (e.g., in Looker) to diagnose what's driving or blocking core metrics like transitions, usage, CSAT, and launch momentum. • Use data and diagnosis, not authority, to earn the trust of a highly analytical engineering and impact organization. Continuous Improvement Drive better decision making, organizational design and operating orientation using data-driven insights • Pair alongside individual leaders on specific strategic challenges, both to bolster their output and to diagnose whether a gap is about skills, structure, or hiring. • Inform performance management and promotions with impact data. • Maintain a clear view of the organization's critical-path portfolio, including how it breaks down between funded work (what states or customers are paying us for) and unfunded work — a key input into planning and resourcing decisions. • Continuously improve the operational excellence function's own methodology — refining the templates, tools, and processes it runs on (e.g., the PVP sheet, planning docs, review formats) — and share what's working across teams rather than reinventing it in each forum. Systems Management Designs systems to capture and improve our unit economics • Help