Chief Operations Officer
Techosystem
I began in finance, which is orderly by design, and discovered quickly that the real problems lived in the spaces no one officially owned. I kept getting pulled into cross-functional gaps, crisis moments, and the quiet breakdowns that happen long before anyone gives them a name. Over time my remit shifted from numbers to systems, from systems to people, and eventually to the work of keeping entire organizations from collapsing under their own speed. Growing up in Ukraine taught me how to operate under pressure and adapt without theatrics, which became its own professional advantage. Today, as COO, my role is less about firefighting and more about predicting where the next fire would have started. The job hasn’t become easier, but it has become clearer.
A perfect week is one where the system holds. The meetings are short because the decisions were already made in writing. The team feels informed without being flooded. There’s space for strategy that doesn’t get hijacked by emergencies, and the emergencies that do appear come with context instead of chaos. It’s a week where numbers tell the truth early, where expectations are aligned, and where I get at least one uninterrupted morning to build something that will make everyone’s life easier next month. Quiet, predictable progress. That’s the ideal.
I’m most proud of rebuilding organizations during moments when collapse felt more likely than recovery. Not because the turnaround was dramatic, but because it required the kind of quiet, disciplined work that rarely gets celebrated. Creating systems that helped teams regain stability, rebuilding trust through clarity, and restoring financial predictability under pressure were the moments that shaped me. They proved that good operations can hold an entire organization together long enough for strategy and morale to catch up. It’s not a headline achievement, but it’s the one that mattered most.
I can see the weak point in a system before it becomes a problem. Some people call it experience. Others call it intuition. It’s really pattern recognition sharpened by years of watching organizations strain in the same predictable places. I notice what isn’t being said, what isn’t documented, and what will eventually buckle if no one intervenes. It’s not flashy, but it’s the thing that keeps everything else from falling apart.
Decision flows. They expose reality in a way meetings never do. A good decision flow clarifies ownership, removes guesswork, and forces a team to confront how work actually moves rather than how they imagine it moves. It prevents the familiar cycle of “Who was supposed to handle this?” and replaces it with a map that holds up under pressure. In my world, that’s non-negotiable.
A clear hierarchy of priorities. When things are burning, emotion tries to take over, but the work only moves if someone is willing to separate noise from signal. I slow the situation down, name what actually matters, and strip away everything that doesn’t. Years of crisis work taught me that calm isn’t a personality trait. It’s a method. You focus on the next correct action and let the rest wait its turn.
Great ops leadership is the ability to give an organization back its stability. It’s knowing when to intervene, when to stay out of the way, and when to ask the question no one wants to answer. It means building systems that outlast your presence and habits that hold under pressure. And it requires the discipline to tell the truth early, even when the truth is inconvenient. The best ops leaders don’t create dependency. They create clarity.
Most operational fires are not caused by lack of capacity. They’re caused by leaders avoiding decisions. Teams compensate with urgency, improvisation, and Slack messages that look like alarms, but the root problem is almost always unresolved ownership at the top. Ops gets blamed for “inefficiency” when the real issue is indecision disguised as collaboration. It’s uncomfortable to say out loud, but it’s true in every industry I’ve worked in.
What excites me about the future of Ops is the growing attention to how people actually function. For years, operations relied on willpower and endurance. Now we’re finally designing systems that align with human cognition instead of fighting it. Neuroscience, behavioral design, and better tooling are making it possible to build processes that reduce friction, support focus, and keep teams from burning out under constant urgency. The work is shifting from operational toughness to operational intelligence. And that feels like a long-overdue correction.
Learn to see what other people overlook. Most operational problems don’t announce themselves. They appear as small inconsistencies, repeated misunderstandings, or decisions that keep slipping through the cracks. Pay attention to those. They tell you more about an organization than any roadmap. Don’t chase heroics. Build habits, not drama. Document decisions, ask direct questions, and get comfortable being the person who names the real issue in a room full of polite silence. And remember: your value isn’t in fixing everything. It’s in preventing the same problems from returning.