---
title: "A Day in the Life of a RevOps VP"
episode: 16
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Bernardo Alves"
guest_title: "Engagement Manager, LeanScale"
date_published: 2023-07-25
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:19:19
word_count: 3228
topics: ["revenue-operations", "gtm-strategy", "sales-leadership", "forecasting"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/bernardo-alves-day-in-the-life-revops-vp/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# A Day in the Life of a RevOps VP — Full Transcript

> Episode 16 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Bernardo Alves.
> Published July 25, 2023 · 00:19:19 · 3,228 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/bernardo-alves-day-in-the-life-revops-vp/

## 00:00 — The strategic–tactical toggle (cold open)

**[0:00]** A key characteristic of a great RevOps leader is being able to step between those two roles and get tactical when needed in order to provide a specific outcome to a business problem but also be able to expand and look at the overall strategy and help guide the company on where to go as a whole.

**[0:27]** Welcome to The LeanScale Podcast where we talk about everything RevOps. Thank you for listening.

## 00:38 — Who this is for: a VP with a full RevOps team

**[0:38]** Since revenue operations is such a new function, I think a lot of VPs or RevOps are finding themselves in the role for the first time and I think it's difficult for them to understand exactly what they should be doing or exactly what they're responsible for. So I'm happy to go into this with you, Bernardo. I think it's going to be a good topic. I think there's a lot of new VPs of RevOps out there that will benefit from this conversation and I hope we give them a few tips that are helpful. Yeah, absolutely. Let's get right into it. So first I want to frame who we're talking about. So sometimes you may end up in the role,

**[1:14]** if you're an early stage startup, you end up managing some systems, then you end up being a manager of RevOps. What I really want to talk about is a VP of RevOps that has a full-blown RevOps team. You have somebody dedicated for systems, enablement. You may have PMs for the functions and I want to talk about what that VP should be focused on. Yeah, absolutely. So if you don't meet those criteria, don't worry. We'll talk a little bit about how you can ease your way into it as you're building a team. But if you're in that mid to late Series B, early Series C profile where you have a built-out team and you can focus on these matters,

## 01:56 — The one word that matters: strategic

**[1:56]** think the big word that comes to mind is strategic, right? You are a VP after all and you should be involved in key business decisions. So being able to focus your time less so on firefighting, on small matters, you should be the one driving strategy, driving influence, and you should be using your time and your privileged position as an intrinsically cross-functional role to kind of tie it all together and help everyone get to where they need, right? Every other leader in the go-to-market life cycle is typically going to have their bias in terms of

## 02:34 — RevOps as the cross-functional glue

**[2:34]** how can I best serve my function, support my team. You're a bit of a glue as the VP of RevOps, right? You're the one intermingling with all those departments to come up with a singular concise strategy. Leverage that. You should be the one driving the influence. So one of the big things that we like to focus on is your go-to-market plan, right? You should be at the forefront of the company planning process, working with all those cross-departmental functions, international teams. If your team, if your company has those functions, you'll be the central point to aggregate all that information and help everyone come together to create a singular

## 03:15 — Owning the go-to-market operating plan

**[3:15]** view of the business. And I think that takes a lot of work. I think a lot of people underestimate what it takes to put together an overall operating plan, especially for the go-to-market portion of it. And if you are a VP of RevOps, I think that's the most important thing that you focus on, making sure you have a sound operating plan built on data, built on assumptions that make sense, and you're able to monitor that plan as you go through the year, go through the quarter. And a lot of VPs of RevOps just don't... I think they think they don't have time to focus on it or

## 03:54 — Why RevOps under-prioritizes strategy: the sales-bias trap

**[3:54]** they don't prioritize it. And why do you think that is? I think part of it is simply due to the structure of where RevOps tends to report into, right? RevOps oftentimes evolves as an extension of sales ops. So there's an inherent sales bias and it lives directly under a VP of sales or CRO role that has a certain bias of, "Hey, you are a function of our team. You're here to support our team." And that can lead to a bias in which you don't feel empowered to work on these bigger strategic processes. But that's really where you need to be focusing your time, right? I think we

**[4:35]** will talk about in a different podcast about where RevOps should fit, but being able to have that unbiased perspective is critical to the success of the function, right? Like I mentioned earlier, nobody else is going to have the privilege of being able to work with all of those departments with a singular goal of how do we succeed as a business at the VP level more than RevOps. So being able to leverage that is super important. Yeah, I agree. And I think spending time with the functional leaders is really important. Monitoring the plan and then providing insights

## 05:11 — The conductor metaphor

**[5:11]** to functional leaders when things look like they're not going well, or it looks like there might be more opportunity to capture that we're not focused on or not investing enough in. You really need to be the person who sits between all those functions and guides them. I think a good metaphor might be like a conductor. You may not be playing a specific instrument, but you're making sure the entire ensemble is aligned and producing music. So I think that's something that a lot of VPs or RevOps maybe don't recognize that that's their role or recognize the importance of investing

**[5:49]** their time there, because sometimes it may feel like it's not as productive as building something in the systems or creating a report or creating a dashboard. It may feel like you're not producing when a lot of VPs or RevOps come from a production type of role, but you really have to step into that alignment role and strategy role. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think a lot of it is also going to be dealing with what the initial constraints of the business are. I think you hit it right on the head that a lot of ops roles stem from a need, especially a production need, right? I think the

**[6:25]** organic flow and how ops develops in most companies is we have a problem. We need somebody to support it, and then you kind of become beholden to those obligations rather than coming in initially as a strategic driving function of growth. And oftentimes you have to fight upstream a little bit in order to earn your wings and be able to feel like you can come into those conversations and bring that value to the team. But that's where you're going to be most successful. The less amount of time that you can spend firefighting, working on individual reporting, and instead focusing on

**[7:06]** bringing the analytics of what your team should be providing and adding those business insights to come up with a strategy for the business on what bets you should be making in, where are the deficiencies that you can address, bottleneck analysis, things like that will immediately start adding a lot more value into the function and the business as a whole. And it's something that's desperately needed, especially as we gear more and more towards a how do we grow efficiently and sustainably world rather than a growth at all costs world, ops as input, and that will become

**[7:46]** more and more relevant over time. It will. And in particular, if you're sitting in a VPC, you will be valued more on the decisions you make and the ideas that you create than the actual production of those ideas. Yeah, no, absolutely. And you're going to have to come into tactical action items here and there. You're not going to be able to get away from it. Your team will need that daily support from you as well. But the key characteristic of a great RevOps leader is being able to step between those two roles and get tactical when needed in order to provide a specific outcome to a business problem, but also be able to expand and look

## 08:34 — What NOT to do: firefighting and building reports

**[8:34]** at the overall strategy and help guide the company on where to go as a whole. If you can manage your day and navigate between those two, prioritizing that latter function of the big picture thinking, you're going to be in a much better position to help your team succeed. So we've talked about some of the things a VP of ops should be doing. Sometimes it's easier to frame it the opposite way. What should you not be doing? Yeah, absolutely. I think the easiest one to get caught in is firefighting, dealing with emergencies, kind of like if your VP of sales or

**[9:14]** your VP of marketing have an immediate need, you'll probably be the first person that they'll call, delegate that. You should have a team that's empowered and able to make anything happen, be it from a reporting perspective, from an immediate fixing and error perspective in terms of a fire drill like that. You should not be caught in those shoes, especially on the reporting analytics. If you're going to be touching data, you better be coming up with a pretty good analytical reason for it, more so than a reporting reason for it. Looking for insights, not

**[9:49]** constructing the report itself. Absolutely. Yeah, it should be for a purpose of, will this data help me answer a business decision or make a bet that will pay off in the future? The answer is no, you probably shouldn't be looking at that data. Give it to somebody else on your team. So another practical way to look at this, I think at the end of the day, everybody has same amount of hours, same amount of days in a week, weeks in a year. What would a schedule look like for a VP of RevOps? So maybe starting annually and then like quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily. What would a typical calendar look like for a VP of RevOps?

## 10:36 — The annual plan: the ops Super Bowl, and the board room

**[10:36]** Yeah, absolutely. I think the key area of focus and kind of the ops Super Bowl is going to revolve around annual planning, right? That's where you're going to be able to add the most value, helping set goals, expectations, and the overall business decision for the year is going to be really the core thing that you're going to look at. And that involves anything from goal setting, setting up an operating plan, capacity planning to help support all your business functions in sales, marketing, et cetera. You'll be very involved in all of their process, or at least you should be,

**[11:16]** so that you can have that holistic perspective and help the business succeed as a business, rather than individual departments. Expanding onto that, you're probably going to get a lot of mileage when it comes to board meetings time. You should be an active participant in the board meeting, not only in the term of getting prep done for it, but I think a great VP of RevOps should be in that room. Nobody's going to be better poised and positioned to talk about that data. Then you hopefully help compile a lot of it and help set the foundations as to why those decisions

## 11:52 — If you're not in annual planning or the board room, you're not a VP

**[11:52]** and why those results came to be in the first place. So board meeting prep will be a big one. And then in terms of, I want to pause there. I think if you are not part of the annual planning process and not just part of, but leading, and you're not in the board room, you're not a VP of RevOps. Yeah, you're probably just at a director level and I would challenge you. Hey, find ways to get more involved in there because it won't only benefit you and help your career growth. The business probably needs you. Absolutely. So that's a really good, some big annual quarterly milestones. What does a month look like in the life of a VP of RevOps?

## 12:36 — The monthly view: tracking to plan

**[12:36]** You're probably going to do a lot of tracking against plan, tracking against forecasts, making sure that you have an explanation alongside the VP of Sales Marketing CS as to what's going on around the business so that you can make any adjustments at those quarterly marks. So having a really strong pulse of what's going on, what are the changes, what are the investments that you're making. And then overall, if there's any tax tech decisions, anything like that in terms of process that will bring organizational change management, for lack of a better term, you should probably be involved in that from an enablement perspective as well,

**[13:11]** help and drive that decision. But really, I think at the core of it, you're probably going to be spending a lot more time meeting with other stakeholders than you expect. It's not going to be a role where you're in a spreadsheet working on individual work. If less than half your time is spent collaborating with other leaders in the business, you've probably got the wrong mix there. Yeah, I'm with you. I think a typical week, you should, as a VP of RevOps, you should absolutely be having a one-on-one with the head of sales, one-on-one with the head of marketing, one-on-one

## 13:52 — The weekly cadence: 1:1s with every functional leader

**[13:52]** with the head of CS. If you have a partnership or channel strategy, a one-on-one with the head of partnerships or channel, you should also be integrated into their weekly team meetings as well so that you have a really good finger on the pulse of how the team is doing, how the leaders are doing, the sentiment of the teams, the sentiment of leadership, what's working, what's not working. That weekly cadence of really keeping your finger on the pulse is unbelievably important. And since you're going to be in that board room and you're likely leading the go-to-market portion

**[14:28]** of the board deck and helping to craft the story of what's going on and explaining, you should be doing that on a monthly basis too. Absolutely. Pretend you have a board meeting every month and be prepared for it. And do it internally. Do it with your executive team. And you tell the executive team how things are going. So that way, you have a bit more time to prepare for when... I think it's a big show when you go to the board meeting. You have a lot of information that is still in a really short period of time. And if you're not in this rhythm of keeping your

**[15:02]** finger on the pulse on a weekly basis, putting things together on a monthly basis as an understanding of what's happening with the business, it's going to be really tough to do it at the board level. Absolutely. The last thing that you want is to get into a board room where you don't have the answers or you're not predicting the questions that they're going to be asked. And you need to know how the business is doing, how your data is doing in order to get ahead of those questions. And I think it's also worth mentioning. All those meetings that you called out,

**[15:32]** those are probably the bare minimum here, right? A lot of ops functions are going to be broader in scope. At the very least, you'll be servicing and helping the marketing CS and sales front. But a lot of time you're going to be taking on some finance work as well, some product work as well. So you're really going to be meeting with everyone that's helping drive that revenue engine in some way, shape, or form. It's probably worth meeting with them on a regular basis and helping align and have a clear understanding of what's coming down the pipeline and

## 16:04 — The morning coffee dashboard: a daily data ritual

**[16:04]** where do we want to be, you know, three, six, nine, 12 months from now. Yeah, you really have to play that linchpin or cornerstone role of the team and people are going to depend on you to be that glue. So another thing I think is important if you're a VP of RevOps, I would get in the habit of every morning taking a look at the data that you need to look at. We build this type of dashboard for our customers and I have my own that I use, but we call it the morning coffee dashboard. So every morning when you wake up, grab your coffee, take a look at the morning coffee dashboard, see what

**[16:46]** happened yesterday. Any big wins, any big concerns, any data inconsistencies, keep a daily finger on the pulse as if you're watching the stock market or something like that. Really have a tight understanding of what's going on on a daily basis so that way you have a good rhythm to put together that weekly and monthly reporting and you have your finger on the pulse when you're having one-on-ones with the other functional leaders too. And it not only builds your own internal understanding of the data, but I think one of the key words here that I want to use to describe this is it builds trust

## 17:23 — Finding problems first builds trust

**[17:23]** for the team, right? No one wants to be the person telling you that there's a problem in the data, that's what they expect you to bring to them as the VP of Ops. If you're the one who's always getting ahead of the data, knowing where it's at, identifying gaps before they become a problem that somebody else notices, people are going to appreciate working with you. Absolutely. If you don't find it first, then you lost. So let's just recap. If you find yourself in a VP of RevOps role, remember you have to stay strategic, get out of firefighting, find ways to delegate things to

**[17:58]** your team, build out the team as you scale so that you're able to stay strategic, and focus on alignment. Your biggest responsibility is the annual operating plan. So making sure the go-to-market portion of that plan is functioning well, monitoring performance to plan, and having the insight to understand if you're not hitting the plan or if you're leaving opportunities on the table. And from a schedule perspective, make sure you're meeting with functional leaders at least weekly. As you mentioned, it's the bare minimum. Doing board meeting dry runs on a monthly basis,

## 18:36 — Recap and scaling into the role

**[18:36]** be in the boardroom, and every year be part of, if not leading, that annual planning process. Absolutely. And if you're not quite there yet, in terms of having that team, focusing on making sure that you're positioning yourself to be able to scale, you're probably going to want to first invest in a systems admin, probably followed by a reporting person to unlock your bandwidth to focus on these strategic matters. Absolutely. Bernardo, thank you so much for going through it. Thank you for listening to this episode. If you liked the discussion, please like, share, and subscribe to wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss a new episode.

**[19:19]** you