A cONference for operations professionals.

On the 2nd of December, 2021, we held the first ever global cONference for startup and scaleup operations professionals. A massive thank you to everyone who attended it! 🙌

We had a great turnout of operations professionals from across 11 countries, including the UK, US, Germany, Nigeria and Kenya.

We've captured a few of the highlights below, but first off, we'd like to give a MASSIVE thank you to our incredible speakers and sponsors, without whom this conference would not have been possible. 👏

cONference attendees had an opportunity to:

👀 DISCOVER what operations is all about from seasoned operations professionals.

🌱 GROW by learning what it takes to bring you to the next level in your career path.

🤝 CONNECT with like-minded people by networking in our breakout rooms.

🎉 CELEBRATE everything that makes an operations career such a fascinating choice!

Scroll down to see what happened on the day!

The Discover panel, moderated by Ben Gateley, CEO and former COO of CharlieHR, and a host of The Culture Ops Podcast, focused on four unique specialities within operations: People Ops, Product Ops, Revenue Ops, and Chief of Staff. The panelists defined each of these verticals and discussed what success looks like within each area.

Our panelists were:

• Scott Amenta, Founder of the Chief of Staff Network and Sylva
• Maria Gyemant, Curator of @PeopleOps and People & Talent Consultant at The People Collective
• Sean Lane, Host of Operations podcast and Senior Director, Field Operations at Drift
• Gerisha Nadaraju, Founder & Host of the Product Ops Podcast and Head of Biz Ops at Dojo

The Grow Panel

The Grow panel, moderated by Charlene Chen, Co-Founder of Operations Nation, featured operations leaders at different phases of their ops careers speaking about the various decisions and challenges they have faced in their journeys and providing advice on how to approach these opportunities.

Our panelists were:

• Brooks Busch, CEO & Co-Founder of Elate, and Host of Aspiring Ops podcast
• Marta Kutt, Principal Business Operations at Qatalog
• Mike Strange, Director of Operations at Just Eat for Business
• Kelsey Traher, COO at Marvel App, Co-Founder of COO Stories

The Fireside Chat

We were thrilled to wrap up the day with a Fireside Chat featuring Allison Pickens, Investor and Former COO of Gainsight, and Hari Raghavan, CEO of AbstractOps and former fintech COO.

Allison and Hari shared incredible insights on how operations has evolved over the years and how we as operations professionals need to have a wide range of skills, not only at a micro level but at a systems level.

CONNECT

We opened up the day with  5-minute Speed Networking , and are pleased that there were over 80 networking sessions across all attendees. We sincerely hope that you will stay connected and continue building bridges across our extended network of operations professionals.

After the Discover panel, we broke out into Roundtable Discussions:

• Chief of Staff with Scott Amenta, Founder of the Chief of Staff Network and Sylva.
• People Ops with Maria Gyemant, Curator of @PeopleOps and People & Talent Consultant at The People Collective.
• Revenue Ops with Sean Lane, Host of Operations podcast and Senior Director, Field Operations at Drift.
• Product Ops with Gerisha Nadaraju, Founder & Host of the Product Ops Podcast and Head of Biz Ops at Dojo.

This was an opportunity for attendees to meet other professionals working within the same ops speciality and to ask our Discover panelists additional questions.

CELEBRATE

One of the many things we're passionate about is celebrating the people, systems, and tools that sometimes receive less recognition and airtime than functions supposedly sexier than operations. So, we decided to host our first annual Operations Nation Awards. These were this year's winners:

Best Ops Books

Measure what Matters by John Doerr and The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Sean Covey and Chris McChesney

Best Ops Podcasts

Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman and Product Ops Podcast with Gerisha Nadaraju

Best Ops Tool

Notion

Best Framework

OKRs

Biggest Ops Inspiration

Operations communities, including mentor & mentee relationships

Best Label for Ops People

Octoptimist 🐙 (submitted by Isabel Taylor, COO of Fineazy)

Allison Pickens

Ben Gateley

Brooks Busch

Charlene Chen

Gerisha Nadaraju

Marta Kutt

Hari Raghavan

Mike Strange

Kelsey Traher

Scott Amenta

Maria Gyemant

Sean Lane

Astrid Verstraete

Co-Founder of Operations Nation

Also Co-Founder of Ops Stories, Operations Consultant at Kibun Consulting

Aušrinė Keršanskaitė

Co-Founder of Operations Nation

Also Co-Founder of Ops Stories, Head of Operations at Sphere

Charlene Chen

Co-Founder of Operations Nation

Also COO at Lantum, Founder of COOhort, Advisory Board Member of SOS at JBM, Board Member of AZA

"We wanted to create an accessible space where any operations professional can easily find the right resources and content to thrive in their careers." — Astrid, Aušrinė and Charlene

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