A cONference for operations professionals.
Join us for our annual, fully virtual cONference on the 3rd & 4th of October 2022.
A global two half-day virtual conference specifically designed for startup and scaleup operations professionals to discuss the many challenges encountered along the path to “operational excellence”, hear from seasoned ops leaders, and connect with other ops folks from across the globe.
👀 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!
Get your cONference 2022 ticket here
Thanks so much to our wonderful sponsors:
Agenda
All times in BST (London/UK time)
Monday, 3rd of October
1:00 - 1:10 pm — Day 1 Welcome from Operations Nation Team
1:10 - 1:40 pm — Networking Session
1:50 - 2:35 pm — Strategy vs. Operations: What comes first, the chicken or the egg?
2:45 - 3:30 pm — People Debate: Is Operations just a cost centre or a growth accelerator?
3:30 - 4:00 pm — Networking Session
4:15 - 5:00 pm — Organisational Design: When should Operations be centralised versus decentralised?
5:10 - 5:55 pm — Organisational Performance: As an Ops Leader, are you supposed to be more of an Aggregator or Influencer of metrics?
Tuesday, 4th of October
1:00 - 1:10 pm — Day 2 Welcome from Operations Nation Team
1:10 - 1:55 pm — Risk Management: How do you identify and mitigate risks as you scale your operations without becoming too risk-averse?
2:10 - 2:55 pm — Customer Operations: How do you ensure operations is embedded into the entire Customer Journey?
3:00 - 3:45 pm — Networking Session
3:50 - 4:50 pm – Systems and Processes Debate: SaaS vs. No-Code
4:50 - 5:00 pm — cONference Wrap Up
6:00 pm — After-Party in London! NB: tickets are sold separately — grab yours HERE 🍻😉
Speakers & Panelists
Caro Griffin
Caro is an operations leader passionate about building sustainable businesses that are great places to work. As the General Manager of Tech Ladies, she has helped grow the largest community of women in tech into a seven-figure business. She's also the host of Opsy, a podcast and community for operations professionals working in tech, and the winner of Zapier’s first-ever No Code Day Contest.
Charlene Chen
Clare Hawthorne
Clare is the Director of Product Operations at Oscar Health. She is an Operations leader with 15 years of extensive cross-functional experience and a soft spot for helping companies and teams evolve their processes for scale. Her experiences have included Product, Customer Success, Finance, Human Resources and DEI for B2B technology companies. She has worked for companies at all sizes: large enterprises (Citigroup & Bloomberg) and pre-seed startups (joined as employee #8). Outside of work, Clare enjoys advising startups, particularly in the HR Tech space and serves on the junior board of a New York based non-profit, Harlem Academy.
Fadi Hindi
Fadi is a commercially minded Operations & People Executive who views the culture and business as a product. He sees his role in any company he joins as someone who moves to the shape of the business, the strategy, the executive team, and the individual themselves. His job is to make the company itself valuable. For every company that he joins or advises, he always strives to gain a deep understanding of business, people management, and the startup market and ecosystem.
Fiona Chorlton-Voong
Fiona is the Co-Founder and COO of The Portfolio Collective, the world’s fastest growing online community for portfolio professionals. The first fifteen years of her career were spent developing brand strategy for high-end fashion houses and sales processes for tech companies. As her leadership skills evolved, she shifted focus to the world of startups, sourcing innovative tech start-ups for investment and launching HighNetwork, a business development enterprise app for professional service firms. In 2020, she met Ben Legg (ex COO Google Europe) and was inspired by his mission to build a new future of work. Shortly after, they put their vision into action by launching The Portfolio Collective, ensuring continuous learning and collaborative support for thousands of portfolio professionals around the world.
Ghilaine Chan
Ghilaine is passionate about allowing people to do their best work and delight others.
With over 20 years' experience of scaling distributed, remote and international teams she has learned, that, hoping people will play nice together doesn't work, it is hard and emotionally taxing, especially with the uncertainty and ambiguity of operating in a fast paced, changing environment.
She works with leaders of early stage and fast growing organisations, activating their teams to work better together and exceed their customers' expectations. Providing practical approaches to motivate and empower teams to deliver effectively with limited resources.
She has a wide and varied career, mostly in technology, spanning many disciplines and uses her 'jack of all trades' skillset to communicate, translate and understand the different perspectives of the individuals involved in any team. She particularly enjoys working with cross-functional, technical teams.
Hari Raghavan
Hari is the CEO at AbstractOps, a platform unifying HR & Legal operations in a single workspace. Previously Hari was employee #1 and COO at Forge Global (NYSE: $FRGE), and a management consultant at BCG. Hari is also an active early stage investor (Notion, Mercury, Rippling, On Deck, Pulley).
Hugo Froes
Leading Product Operations at OLX Motors by day. Speaker, Mentor and Teacher by night.
With over 20 years in the field of product and design, Hugo has explored user centered methodologies, team topologies and change management, while working on creating scalable and sustainable product teams. His main focus is helping teams reach their full potential to build better products.
As a teacher in various institutions, a co-founder of UXDiscuss and previously a board member of the Global ResearchOps community, he strives to also contribute to the community and help shape young minds towards user centered methodologies.
He loves interesting challenges and spending time with family, reading a book, listening to some tunes or watching a movie.
Huw Bevan
Huw Bevan is COO at Jyre - a digital platform created develop high-performing teams and leaders. Previously, he spent 6 years in ops at Uber, UK - initially launching cities in a decentralised model and then building and leading centralised teams across marketplace, safety and rider products.
Jeffrey Szczepanski
Jeff is Founder and CEO of Reframe Technologies and an American expat from upstate New York living in central London. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering and has been involved in computers and entrepreneurial activities since the ripe age of 10 years old.
Jeff started his career working in corporate America learning the best and worse about large organizations. Since that time Jeff has been a founder and/or early employee and senior executive of several startups including:
- CTO and Co-founder of Allworx, acquired by PAETEC Holdings.
- COO at Stack Overflow, acquired by Prosus for $1.8B.
- COO of Sphere Knowledge Ltd, acquired by Twitter.
Jeremey DuVall
Jeremey leads customer experience at Ness, a fintech on a mission to make "healthy" more accessible. Prior to Ness, he managed customer support teams at Zapier, WPVIP, and Automattic. He's all about keeping the customer front and center (that's why the company exists after all!) and a firm believer in leveraging insights from support and customer outcomes across every department. He writes a weekly note for Operations enthusiasts all about running more effective, efficient, and prepared organizations.
Joe Aurilia, Jr.
Joe is a seasoned operations executive with over 20 years dedicated to technical and operational leadership. He has served in a wide variety of roles in both corporate and startups all focusing on core technology and operational excellence. Throughout his career Joe has executed operational and technical strategies key to business expansion, successful funding rounds, and extensive company growth.
While a technologist at heart, Joe’s most recent ventures have placed him in core roles responsible for enabling operational scalability. A focus on successful team alignment has resulted in explosive people growth and international expansion.
Joe has led a variety of Operations team including Technology Operations, Contract Operations, Revenue Operations, People Operations, Security Operations, PMO, and Talent Acquisition. Key to success of each has been the empowering of teams to reach beyond expected boundaries and achieve higher limits.
When not working you will find Joe enjoying the exploration of new places, hiking local trails, and chasing his little one around. He is also a firm believer there is no such thing as rewatching Marvel movies too many times.
Karina Mikhli
Karina started out managing content operations and then migrated to other industries. Most recently she was a fractional COO to various startups and small businesses, as well as a workflow consultant helping clients optimize and automate their systems and processes. She is currently the COO at Enertech Search Partners and still avid about optimizing and automating workflows.
Kristen Shannon
Kristen Shannon is a results-driven executive with over 10 years of experience in strategy development, operational execution, and organisational scaling. Her career focus has been working in high-pressure companies going through periods of significant and fast-paced growth or change. Kristen has worked for ambitious organisations that have more than doubled in size year on year, leading both recruitment of over 800 FTE a year as well as leading and scaling operations teams. Before consulting for both high growth start-ups and multinational tech companies Kristen was COO of General System, a deep tech company based in London and has also served in multiple acting COO roles as part of her work with Highliner.
Lex Sisney
Lex Sisney is a business scaling expert and a wizard at organizational structure and design. He works with CEOs and leadership teams of expansion-stage companies who are committed to growing their business without compromising their values.
Louis Warner
Louis has been working in leadership roles at high growth technology ventures for twenty five years and is currently the COO of Founders Factory, a global tech operating and investing business with a global portfolio of 300+ tech companies, 50 of which it has built from scratch. He was also part of one Europe's biggest tech-co’s (lastminute.com) from the founder era through it’s public IPO.
Maria Campbell
VP People turned COO, Maria has pioneered inclusive people-led strategies for tech unicorns such as Snyk, GoCardless, and Monzo. She enjoys building structures and systems in high-growth, engineering-led companies. Her career sweet spot is helping startups establish the right cultural and operational environment to scale successfully. She has been recognised as one of the Top 25 Women Leaders in Financial Technology in Europe by The Financial Technology Report and as one of London's 20 Most Impressive & Successful Banking VPs by Best Startups (2022).
Rahul Desai
Rahul Desai is the founder of Upslope, an online school for operations professionals. Throughout his experiences in BizOps and strategy consulting, he saw time and again that people lacked knowledge of modern tools and tactics, so he created Upslope to solve that. In his prior roles, he managed functions including Ops, HR, Finance, IT, and more. His superpower is using no-code and low-code for workflow automation.
Riley McGhee
Former mental performance coach turned operations consultant, Riley blends his knowledge of human behavior with the practicalities of building a business. His curiosity and passion for efficiency led to creating his own consultancy where he worked with entrepreneurs and teams to simplify, streamline, and systemize their business. Since 2021 he has served as the Chief Operating Officer for PVL, a mental health training & consultancy startup which aims to help companies build mentally healthy cultures and improve mental health in the workplace. With no formal business training, Riley believes that progress is better than perfect, that everyone has mental health, and that dogs are inherently better than cats.
Rona Ruthen
Rona has a strong background in Fintech and operations, most recently as ex Head of Ops at Curve & VP of Customer Operations at Monzo. Over the past few years she has led Monzo’s award winning Customer support and Ops team through hyper growth (1-6m customers), leading a team of over 1000 people and owned the £40m P&L. Her role has involved designing the Operating model, leading customer experience improvements and cost reduction projects and building high performance leadership teams.
Sabrina Castiglione
Sabrina is COO at Pento, making payroll painless, and former CFO at Tessian where she grew the company from 7 to 300. Looking after Finance, People, Talent, Legal, BizOps & IT, Sabrina's focus is on building great cultures that drive great performance.
Sarah Touzani
Sarah is a fractional/freelance COO helping fast-growing startups scale by reducing their operational pain points. She is also an advisor to a number of early-stage start-ups and an occasional angel investor alongside a great group of founders and operators at VenturesTogether. In 2018, she took the leap and jumped from the corporate world to join Creditspring, which was then a 6-people team preparing to launch its first product, as their first Ops hire. Fast forward four and a half years:
- She helped grow the company to serve more than 180,000 happy customers.
- She built a team of 35 stellar individuals across Customer Operations, Business Operations, Data/BI, People and Compliance.
- She led strategic projects that reduced operating costs, improved revenues, and accelerated growth.
Although Sarah could rely on more than 8 years of experience in consulting and banking, within big European names including KPMG, HSBC and Natixis, she had to navigate an entirely different environment, with responsibilities stretching from replying to their first customers' calls to hiring or product management.
Sarah also holds a French "Grandes Ecoles" Master's degree in Banking & Financial Markets from Toulouse Business School. When she’s not busy with work, she enjoys discussing Ops and start-ups, reading, pottery, boxing and travelling.
Sarah Zarling
Sarah is a no-code/low-code zealot with a passion for process improvement and automation. She has extensive experience in effectively and efficiently tackling operational challenges and is a trusted advisor to leaders and executives, helping them see a new vision for delivering excellence at scale. In addition to her day job, she advises early stage startups and is a well respected educator in operations and no-code communities. Her combined accomplishments and strengths include over 10+ years in: Business Ops, Customer Success/Support Ops, Product Ops, Startups, Healthcare, SaaS, Project & Process Management, Continuous Improvement, Agile Methodology, and Stakeholder Communication. She cannot resist making a flow chart for almost every occasion.
Seni Sulyman
Seni is the Founder of Black Ops, a private network of African operators playing a critical role in building and scaling great companies. He also advises and coaches executives and business leaders on building effective organizations through a mix of strategy, people, culture and operational excellence.
Hosts
"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
Sponsors
Our cONference would not be possible without the help and support of our sponsors. Thank you so much for helping us make this event happen!
Hubble makes hybrid working easy. It's the only platform that helps you configure, deliver, and manage all of your workspace needs in one place, whether that's an HQ office, home or on-demand. Its mission is to improve the working lives of one million people by 2025, as it knows your people are your most valuable asset. Hubble is our gold sponsor and also Operations Nation team's go-to for any event/meeting spaces and co-working. The ON team will, in fact, be running this cONference from one of the Hubble spaces!
Pento lets you run payroll in real time, automating the entire process. With their CIPP-qualified expert support at hand, you never run payroll alone. Add to that a software which is easy to use, automates calculations and payments, syncs with HMRC, and integrates with leading HR and accounting systems, Pento removes any need for manual intervention around data entry, double-checks and human errors. Pento is our silver sponsor and when we have UK payroll, we'll run it on Pento for sure.
Trust Keith is the first founder-centric global data protection solution, offering a dedicated DPO, a data compliance platform, and data protection training, so you can get world-respected compliance certifications. Trust Keith is our bronze sponsor and Operations Nation's long-standing partner for all things data protection and compliance.
JBM is the go-to recruitment company for high-growth companies and future leaders. They’re on a mission to disrupt the traditional recruitment model, by creating lasting human connections through their diverse networks to culturally aligned talent with the skillsets to make a positive impact on business growth and people’s lives. JBM is our bronze sponsor and Operations Nation is also a proud partner of their COO Secrets podcast.
Onside Accounting are Chartered Accountants and Business Advisers supporting high growth businesses in the UK. They offer a vast range of accountancy, tax and other advisory services, working flexibly and collaboratively with their clients. Onside Accounting is our bronze sponsor and has been a longtime supporter of Operations Nation as our accountants and advisors.