Why COO is the most fluid role in the C-Suite — Sara Clemens, former COO of Twitch & Pandora

 Thanks for having me, Brett. It's great to be here.

 Yeah. So I wanted to start by talking, you know, sort of at that 10,000 foot view about sort of the role of the COO. And I think, I think it's often misunderstood because it can mean so many different types of things in so many different types of companies. And so I'm curious, you know, what do you think are some of the biggest myths as it relates to cos, um, and maybe we could use that as kind of a way to start the conversation.

 I think it's misunderstood. Curious kinda way. Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. So I think the single biggest myth is that there is a single COO role, uh, you know, that people sort of think, oh, it looks the same in all organizations. And there simply isn't COO roles vary as much as companies vary.

It's highly dependent on the size of the company. Um, the stage they're operating at what industry or vertical they're operating in and most critically the CEO role. And so for me, The biggest surprise was both how much you have to adapt the COO role for the company in question. And then also how much of a chameleon the COO has to be.

It's not a role that's static, it's very fluid. Um, it changes quickly over time and you have to adapt the role as the needs of the organization. Change.

 why, why do you think it is so varied? Right. If, if you look at, you know, I don't know, a CRO role or a VP sales role, I think there, there are nuances, but you'd say it's kind of 80%, similar, across different types of businesses. And so what is it about the role that you think makes it so, um, unique or different across C.

 So COOs are ultimately a partner to the CEO. That's been my experience in talking to people about roles that the CEO is looking for. Somebody to assist them with a range of functions, generally in a hyper growth or rapidly scaling business. And so the role is often defined by the functions that the CEO is either disinterested in or less experienced that.

And what they're looking for is somebody who has deeper capabilities in those areas to come in and assist them. So. The COO role is really defined, not by sort of a functional scope, but by the needs of the business. And you know, what the needs of the business are at that point in time. So I'll give you a good example.

You know, my role at Twitch, uh, the CEO image sheer is a product and engineering leader. He came up with the idea for Twitch, you know, built all of the product in Eng and as the business scaled, what he was looking for was somebody who had deep expertise in both the go to market functions and corporate functions where he had less experience, uh, was interested in learning, but really wanted somebody to come in and scale those functions while he learned how they would operate.

And, you know, That was very much defined by Emmit's needs and what the organization needed at that point of time, relative to what Emmett was performing. And I have seen this a lot in COO roles. Um, you know, it really comes down at the end to what is at that the CEO needs at that point in time. And that's why the role also evolves as the CEO's experience evolves.

 so how would you compare that with your previous COO job at Pandora?

 Yeah, so Pandora was quite different. Um, I joined as chief strategy officer, so I was focused on defining new growth options. Um, the company at the time was, uh, standalone radio service and they were beginning to think about how they grew beyond that. And, you know, it's all public now. They moved on to build a full service business.

So, um, on demand music that was gonna require a foundational shift in their relationship with the music industry, uh, because their relationship had been quite adversarial historically. And to obtain the licenses that were necessary to do on-demand music, they would need to have a much closer relationship.

And so after doing the initial work saying, you know, this is the investments we would need to make over what timeframes. Um, I then ended up leading a lot of these new investment areas. You know, there were no other leaders in the business that had done this before. Um, I had done a lot of the foundational work on it and had a background that, um, enabled me to build these things quickly.

And so I ended up building out both our music makers business, which were all of the tools for. Labels for artists, they were promotional tools, marketing data tools, and then also integrated live event recommendations and commerce into the, the platform. Uh, and I did that in addition to the historical functions, I run as the chief strategy officer.

And so it was this very distinct transition from doing strategy work, to doing a much broader range of operational, um, efforts, but very much in the new venture side of the business.

 you think about the different co roles that you've had, maybe what you've observed in the ecosystem, could you cluster stylistically the different roles or do you find that it's a long tail of all sorts of different, uh, configurations.

 I think there are definitely some archetypes. Um, so while it's defined by the CEO, you generally see three archetypes. Uh, the first is a classic operations leader. So somebody who is focused very much on operational excellence of service delivery. The second is what I did at Pandora, which was the sort of new business COO who grows adjunct businesses outside of the core, um, and leads investments the third.

And I've, I've not come up for a better name for this. It's the not product or engineering COO. So it's somebody who is working alongside a CEO who has deep expertise in experience in product and engineering. And the COO in those situations runs all the go to market in corporate functions, um, in the business.

 so if you go to the first one, uh, classic operations leader, can you talk more about what that looks like?

 you tend to see those in organizations with a very heavy operational lift. So a good example would be an Uber or a Lyft, uh, door dash, um, Airbnb where a material amount of the business is real time transactions and operational delivery that require, you know, human beings to resolve issues on a real time basis as they arise.

And so it's a very different role than somebody who is operating in more of a plus one to the CEO, um, and helping lead strategy and run a sort of broader range of functions across the business.

 think about these three sort of broader personas, what do you think excellence looks like in that version of a, a COO and how transferable do you think the profiles are across those archetypes?

 So I think about performance as a CEO, along a couple of different dimensions. And I'll have a think as I'm describing these about how different they would be in the three different archetypes. So I think a good COO helps define and communicate a clear strategy for the company. I think they are someone who partners with the CEO to say, right, you know, what are we doing?

Are we all aligned behind the same priorities? And we're all marching in the same direction. I think the second thing they do is ensure that we are organized effectively against those ambitions. And then. That they ensure that there is talent in the organization, um, that is going to be able to help the company succeed.

So have you bought the right leaders in, have you organized, um, the teams across the business to be effective? The third thing is, is the COO operating nimbly and adaptably so, you know, even if you have the best strategy in the world in a hyper growth business, you are going to learn new information every day.

And so you are going to have to iterate the business, um, not in a manner that creates the business to be unstable, but certainly if you've got great new information, you're going to want to use it to scale more quickly. And so that's the sort of third performance factor. And then. The last one I would say is, are you bringing everyone in the company along in a way that maintains and grows the culture of the business?

Are you really thinking about, you know, how do we communicate our strategy, the company, how do we build the culture? How do we make sure we have the right people in place? And when I think about those archetypes, the, the broadest archetype is the sort of plus one to the CEO. Um, when they're running go to market and the, the corporate functions, uh, you, you generally are managing, you know, 50 or 60% of the business from a headcount perspective in those circumstances.

And you're running a really broad range of functions, you revenue, marketing, um, all of your, uh, operations functions, uh, finance people, et cetera. And so. these aspects of the role tend to all be necessary for that leader. Um, you know, that they're really collaborating with the CEO very deeply to, to drive the business and grow it.

I think the operations leader has slightly more of a siloed mentality. So they're going to be much more heavily focused on being as operationally effective and efficient as possible. But I suspect in those roles, the CEO, um, has more to do with thinking about how the entire system operates effectively, as opposed to just the operation silo.

And I think for the COO who is more of a, you know, sort of new ventures, new business leader, , they will have a very strong relationship with the CEO around culture strategy. You know, thinking about like what the direction of the business is, but they tend to be less involved in the core day to day operations.

And so, you know, in that respect, there's probably less focus on sort of iterating the core of the business whilst they focus on those new businesses. I think it's really tough to do all four of these things, but I think that's the aspiration, but I do think the weight of them differs with each type of co

 please go ahead, Sarah. So let's chat about a couple of those, uh, dimensions in a little bit more detail. The, the first one is around defining and communicating a clear strategy, I thought it might be interesting to talk about what strategy means to you because I've, I think it's one of these words that is very confusing and, um, has kind of been bastardized over many years. And so I'm curious across the organizations that, that you've worked in and sort of when you zoom out, what, what is a clear strategy or what makes a great strategy versus a poor one?

 for me, strategic alignment or having a strategy that everybody is bought into is around having a clear north star of the business. You know, it's the mission, vision strategy trifecta. So why do we exist as a business? You know, what is the, the opportunity we are going against? What problem are we solving?

And you know, what do we want the outcome of having solved that problem to be, and really ensuring everybody in the organization is aligned around that. I think it's easy to say that there is a strategy statement and great. Everybody understands it, but you know, what I've seen is that often they can be very ambiguous and nobody does the double click on what it actually means at an operating level.

And so you'll find that people are misinterpreting words in the strategy. They are, um, they believe different things are the priority, um, based on the strategy of the business. And so what you find is that can end up with real division inside the company. I'll give you an example. You know, I joined Twitch.

Uh, one of our sort of key tenants was creators first. And to start with that had absolutely been the right strategy for the business, because if you're building a. Marketplace supply side is where you start, you know, nothing else works until you get supply side. You then obviously need to drive demand.

But what had happened as Twitch had evolved was that it had turned into a community service. The. heart of Twitch was the interaction between the creators and the community. And so we felt that by saying we were creators first, we were deprioritizing investments in areas like trust and safety, which were about the health and wellbeing of the viewers.

And, you know, the members in the community who were there, co-creating alongside, um, our streamers. And so we went through a process where we actually redefined the strategy and said, we are community first. And so that rebalanced the resources and the efforts of the organization, and really forced us to sit down and say, well, okay, within the context of that, what are the things that we need to be building in order to achieve that vision?

And. It's strategy is one of those things like, you know, a good one when you see it. Um, and in my mind, it gives you clarity on what you are doing and what you are not doing. And the second point is almost more important than the first point, because as organizations scale and get larger, it's very easy for things to be bolted on to the core business.

 So in the Twitch example, um, and you, when you came in H how do you know if you have a strategy problem, a people problem, like, do, do you sort of have a, diagnostic that's running through your own head?

 When you join a business, um, there are a series of things that you do in order to ascertain, where do you put your energy? And it's very rarely a single thing, but it is critical that you can triage the priorities because you can't do everything at once. Um, when I joined Twitch, I, uh, took on nine different functions in the business.

And, you know, there were a number of, um, leadership areas that we needed to up level, um, and functions that needed to be built out. And you really have to sort of triage well, okay. Where do I place this over? We have a strategy question in the business. That's creating a lot of friction, um, versus other things.

I will say that strategic misalignment in an organization is the number one symptom that a company isn't scaling effectively. So when you ask people the same question and you get multiple answers, you know, you've got a problem. It means all those individual groups are operating independently against a set of misaligned goals.

And so for me, that's like one of the quickest diagnostic tools for working out, like, where do I need to put my energy into in this first three, six months? Um, if you have friction intention in the org around what teams are doing, and you have people sort of pointing fingers at each other around, you know, they're not doing what we need, et cetera, you will often see a lot of busy work.

That's not landing because people aren't operating in a cohesive manner. And so for me, that that's always a early. Warning sign. And, and that would always be my priority coming into a company if I saw those symptoms.

 So building on that, you know, in this example of, of transitioning the strategy from creator first to really community first, what, what were you seeing that made you feel like there was a problem there? I.

 And that can be highly distracting and stop the company from operating in a, you know, nimble and effective fashion. And so strategies really need to align everyone in the org around what is it we are doing? What is it we are not doing? And then operations comes to the how question, you know, what are our priorities this year?

What are we gonna build this year? Um, but I think it helps enormously to have that north star. So questions around the relative effort we put into building things for creators versus the effort we put into building things for the viewers. That was the core, you know, like when you are operating in a world where you say creators first, you would always prioritize your attention to the creators.

You would always build them tools first that were, um, great for them. And what we saw was that a lot of the feedback we were getting from the community was really around the viewer experience and issues that the viewers were having. in using Twitch and, you know, chatting to creators. Um, and so for us, it really defined a movement where we said, we are going to treat viewers and creators with equal weight.

They are both equally important to Twitch. And we need to think about the health of both sides of the marketplace and the relationships in the community in a way that's really going to create like a healthy community versus what we were beginning to see, which were some issues around, um, toxicity to sort

 In terms of evolving the strategy. Do, do you tend to sort of do it in organic fashion or do you have a series of rituals or practices that allow you to reflect and refine a strategy over time?

 I think you want to do it organically. I've very rarely seen the, you know, speech quotes, big strategy, effort, uh, land very well. I think it can be like an awe consuming volcano in an organization. Um, it also takes time when you come into a new company to really understand the history. You know, something is obviously going very well.

You're standing on the shoulders of the people who built the business. That's why they've hired you in you. You very, really are like, oh, I'm joining a failing business. It's like, no something is going great here. How do I accelerate it? How do I make it go even better? And so it's critically important that you really understand the history, um, how it was that things got to the place that they're in.

You want to do that as quickly as possible, but I think it's easy to jump over that step and not spend enough time with people to really be intimate and. the way that the business has evolved over time. And so for me, I feel like a more organic approach is better. Um, often you can just weave it into the existing processes of the business, you know, rather than doing a huge, um, you know, sort of single strategy piece of work, you incorporate it into the annual business planning process.

You know, you, you identify key questions in the business and just do pieces of work around thoses that roll into your, your business plan. And so I think it, it lands better in that

 Um,maybe this is kind of a little bit interconnected, but you mentioned sort of this idea of, of a COO operating nimbly and helping sort of iterate the business. I'd, I'd be interested to have you talk in, in a little bit more detail about that. Like what, what does that actually look like? And maybe if, if you were scoring your own self, maybe in your last role, like H how would you even know how to, to rate yourself in that dimension?

 yeah, I think this is one of the key skills that great CROs have, um, is the ability to once you've defined, you know, here's the strategic direction. Here's what our priorities are to actually be willing to change. Some of those as new information is available so that you, you aren't S slavishly sticking to a single point in time strategy.

You are recognizing that in any hyper growth business, you were going to get new data daily that could. cause you to reconsider the direction that you're taking now, that is a really fine line because you equally don't wanna be in a position where every piece of data that comes in, you know, has you adjust and therefore thrash around, you've gotta pick appropriate timeframes.

You have to have the skill set to recognize the magnitude of the information and how much impactful it'll have on the business. Um, in terms of, you know, personal ratings on that, uh, that's always a hard one to say. You should probably talk to the team at Twitch. Um, uh, you know, I think I have a background in, uh, policy, government policy and strategy.

And so, you know, I have a decent skill set in that space. Uh, I also grew up in New Zealand in a country where. There were 5 million people running the national infrastructure. And so there wasn't a lot of specialism. Um, it was very much a, a business environment where if you were a smart person, people were like, give it a go.

You'll be fine. And so I learned how to learn quickly. the early years of my career were much more about how do you learn inside corporations, uh, new functions, new things to do. How do you get up to speed quickly? And the thing I think that helped me, you know, at the executive stage of my career was that it did give me the facility to be comfortably adaptable.

I enjoy change. I think change management is one of the deepest functions that COOs do. You've been bought in as a change agent frequently. And so. you know, doing that in a way, which is comfortable for the organization, but also pushes it a little bit is a pretty essential part of doing the role.

Um, I'd like to think I was good at it. You know, you'd be better to ask others.

 on that sort of topic of learning. Are there things that you did throughout the week or questions you tended to ask different people inside the organization that oftentimes help you learn the most.

 We had a standing series of meetings. Uh, I am a fan of a standing meeting in that if you have the time booked, you can get the appropriate people together and deal with things in a proactive manner. But if you don't have any agenda items, you can cancel the meeting and. I actually, you know, learned that from Jeff Wener at LinkedIn who, you know, ran the company very effectively.

And so for me, I liked to be in a situation where I was touching base with all the core teams weekly. Uh, so whether it was our trust and safety teams, customer operations, marketing revenue, um, checking in on, you know, how they were performing relative to the sort of operational KPIs of the business, but more critically, were there any issues that were delaying them progressing that I needed to know about?

And you will often find that in a fast moving fast growing. Business, there will be, you know, there will be something that has come up where they're like, we've hit a hurdle. We have a question. We don't feel there's alignment here. Um, there's a new issue that's arising in the market. You know, how do we think about this?

And by having those standing meanings, you can have those conversations in a pretty fluid manner. Um, and it helps you connect the dots across the business. Uh, it really enables you to think about, okay, how's everything operating at a system level. So you can do your role as COO, which is really to optimize the entire system.

You want the subsystems, you know, the sort of functional teams to be working, um, effectively, but what you are there to do is have them work effectively together. And I think though, that sort of regular meeting mechanism really helps with that.

 On sort of this theme I think something that's, that's like a little bit underappreciated is, is the idea of how are the most important problems getting surfaced sort of highest up in the organization. And I think that, you know, some of the sort of management wisdom of like don't bring me problems, bring me solutions actually can create a culture where these problems are kind of tamped down or you have a direct or a direct direct that's just wants to figure it out and solve it themselves before surfacing bad news. And so I I'm interested. Ha have you sort of thought about that or, or engineered your leadership team with sort of that in mind?

 I'm not a fan of the, bring me a solution, not a problem for the reason you just described. I think it can create some perverse incentives, um, and often having a broader awareness brings more minds to the table and, uh, more information more quickly that can help resolve it more quickly. And I, I firmly believe that.

Successful companies are able to resolve issues and address opportunities. Quickly. Speed is, you know, one of the predominant factors in successful companies. And so, you know, analysis paralysis or anything that slows down the issue coming to the table, um, I think is problematic. I like this model of raise issues when they arise.

Um, and I think the critical thing here is that the culture of the business has to be a no blame culture. It's not that an issues arisen and somebody has done something wrong or someone's to blame. It's just like, there's an issue. It's a neutral fact. We have an issue. And then it's a question of, okay, great.

How's it arisen? You know, what do we want to do about it? Is it business critical? Is it something that requires addressing in a meaningful way, but it really relies enormously on that. Sort of open-mindedness of your leadership and, or frankly, people all across the organization that there are no issues you can't bring to the table and that by bringing an issue to the table, it's not an accusation.

It's literally a question it's a, you know, considered question. And, I think when you can get to that culture, your ability to move more quickly and to have a much more enjoyable, um, way of operating is, is materially better

 you do other than. Are mindful when an issue is, is brought up to actually create a no blame culture, like it's obvious if, if you said, okay, here's the roadmap to creating a no blame culture. The number one thing I would assume you would do is when these issues are surfaced, you don't start blaming people.

Um, but other than that, if somebody agrees with that idea and wants to build towards a no blame culture, are, are there other things that you've done or you

 somebody there other things, I think some of it comes down to respect of different functions across the business, generally, where I've seen blame cultures arise. It's when there's a lack of appreciation for different experiences in the company. You know, you get the product team who think the marketing team are idiots or the marketing team.

Think the engineering team aren't delivering, you know, like the finance team think the analytics team won't deliver the information that they require. It, it often is a consequence of, you know, different silos or functions in the business they're being tension between them. And I like to start any role thinking about where are those tension areas, why have they arisen and resolving them?

And I think that's where I was talking about. You come into the organization, you need to get strategic alignment often as you're going through that process of getting everybody aligned, making sure everybody's agree with what you do do you don't do the consequence of that is often, okay. What's the right organizational structure for us to do this.

And what are the. Decision rights across the organization that people will have. And what's the way that we're going to work together to make sure that those decisions are being made quickly. And it can sound quite dry and, you know, mundane, but if you don't get these things right, that's where you can end up with that blame culture arising.

Uh, and you know, I think it's easy when companies are in situations of stress, um, or going through a lot of change for that blame culture to arise quite quickly. I do think leadership has to model the right way to behave. I think that's absolutely critical. Um, you know, the second you have two leaders pointing fingers at each other, it gives everybody else in the company, the entitlement to do the same, but then also.

Ensuring that anybody in the company who does behave in a blaming way understands that's not acceptable. You know, one of the things that I like to do is when you have an individual come to you and complain about somebody else, assuming it's not a sort of confidential, um, uh, HR complaint of some kind, but it was just a business matter.

Ask them if they've already spoken to that person. If they have spoken to that person, say, listen, I'm really happy to have this conversation with you, but I'd like to do it with both of you together. And that often engenders a situation where they're like, oh, okay, it's moved from being a person, a ACS versus person B CS to a, how are we gonna collaborate around how we resolve this issue?

and I think that drives behaviors that are really critical as you mature in an organization, which is your first pillar of call in any situation, when an issue arises is, you know, working with your peers to establish how you can resolve it. You know, as COO, every time I had an issue to resolve, I didn't go to the CEO.

I would go to my peer and say, listen, you know, what are we going to do about this? And how do we resolve it? And so I think it engenders that earlier on, but it also sets the foundation for a no blame culture.

 kind of been woven through what we've chatted about thus far, but we haven't really talked about directly is kind of this idea that it seems like as a business scales, there's almost like these laws of physics where things get slower and bureaucracy tends to creep. If you talk to a 20 person company, and that grows to 2000 and you talk to those people, they often have the same pattern of complaints.

It's slow, it's bureaucratic, it's big company. And so do you think that there's just a certain set of laws that as you add more human beings in a business matures, that it just sort of moves in that direction? Or there are ways to meaningfully fight that or, um, not necessarily get slower and more bureaucratic as you get bigger.

 necessarily, I absolutely think that keeping 20 people aligned around what you want to do and what the latest information is that you need to consider and how you go about doing that is easier than getting 2000 people, you know, like that is a law of physics. Uh, it is much harder to, you know, keep everybody in a 2000 person org across the requisite information that they need, um, in order to be across every detail of the business.

And when you're a 20 person org, you often are because you generally hire an. Generalists at that stage, you're hiring people who can roll their sleeves up and do a whole range of different things. And because of that, they are capable of keeping across, you know, what's going on in all parts of the business.

You'll also find early on people often move between functions. And so they're learning, they've learned the basics of a range of different functions. They sort of haven't come in and specialized immediately. As you grow, the functions that you are building are going to get much more sophisticated, you know, like a finance organization and what you need to do to run finance in a 2000 person.

Multi-billion dollar org is very different to what you need in a, you know, say 200 person early revenue org. And so you are going to have a lot deeper specialism and that specialism comes with less breadth. People will have less awareness of. What's going on across the organization because they're more focused on what they are doing and their part of the company.

Um, and I think the trick as you go through that evolution is two things. The first is helping people understand that not everyone in the org is either going to understand or have all of the information or be involved in every decision in a way they once were like, it's, it's just not practical to run the company.

What once worked and was fast, actually ends up massively slowing you down because trying to get everybody's perspectives when they don't all have the same level of experience in the decisions that might be being made, actually slows things down. You know, it's sort of the irony of the, the situation.

And so helping people understand. You know, actually we need to have arrangements where people have decision rights over different functions and different questions. Because by doing that, we move much faster and you are consulting necessarily people, the right people in the room, and we will let everybody else know what decisions we made.

And we will explain why, so that you have that information as necessary. But, you know, having 2000 people in a room to make a decision is not a practical way of running the business. So I think there are some laws of physics. I also think. , you know, the evolution requires really careful management and I don't think it's impossible to have a fast moving large company.

62c5bc5d7fb0c0053cb040db

Sara Clemens was most recently the COO of Twitch and also previously served as the COO of Pandora. She explores the nuances of this unique C-Suite role and her advice for CEOs considering bringing aboard their first COO. 

Sara Clemens on why COO is the most fluid role in the C-Suite

Sara Clemens explores the nuances of this unique C-Suite role and her advice for CEOs considering bringing aboard their first COO.