I Didn’t Choose Operations. I Just Kept Fixing Things.

I graduated with a communications degree.
PR track. Midwest school. J-School dropout. No master plan.

I didn’t know what “operations” was.
I definitely didn’t know what a Chief of Staff was.
That title barely existed when I started working.

What I did know was that things broke a lot, and I had an annoying habit of noticing.

I came out of college and landed with a mentor who trusted me with far more than my job description implied. His businesses were growing. The ideas were big and impactful. The execution was… messy.

So I stepped in.

Mostly because I cared how the whole thing worked.

I took on more. And then more. And then the things no one really owned.
The in-between stuff.
The “this will quietly fall apart if someone doesn’t deal with it” stuff.

At the time, I thought I was just being useful.
Looking back, I was holding context.

I knew what had been promised and what could actually be delivered.
I listened to customers when they were polite but confused.
I paid attention in rooms where everyone else was talking.

I was usually the only woman in the room, and wow, that shaped how I worked.

Not in a “poor me” way. In a pattern recognition way.

I noticed when board members nodded but didn’t buy in.
When teams said yes and meant “this will break later.”
When something felt off, even if the numbers looked fine.

It took me a long time to realize people were actually listening to those observations.
That they trusted me.
That they were coming to me because I saw what others missed.

Eventually, the people I worked with started looping me into their side projects.
“Can you take a look at this?”
“What do you think is broken here?”
“How would you structure this?”

Marketing. Ops. PR. Sales. Internal messes. External narratives.
It was all fair game.

I LOVED IT.

I loved sitting in on sales meetings with big companies and watching how power moved in the room.
I loved managing boards and investors and translating between vision and reality.
I loved listening to users and then bringing that truth back to the people building the product.

It was chaotic, and I ate it up.

But here’s the thing no one tells you when you’re early in your career doing this kind of work:
There’s no obvious label for it.

My résumé looked all over the place.
Communications here. Operations there. Sales support. Investor work. Events. Everything, and so, nothing?

When I finally encountered another woman slightly ahead of me and asked for help, she said something I’ll never forget:

“No one showed me how to do this. Just figure it out.”

I did figure it out. That part was already in my DNA.

But I also learned something else in that moment.
Something I carry very intentionally now.

Hoarding knowledge doesn’t make you powerful.
It just makes the system more fragile.

I promised myself I would never treat people coming up behind me that way.
Especially women. But really, anyone early in their career trying to make sense of work that doesn’t fit neatly into a box.

What I didn’t know then, but understand very clearly now, is that I wasn’t “all over the place.”

I was learning the system backwards.

I was seeing how decisions ripple.
How misalignment shows up downstream.
How trust is built (or lost) long before a metric moves.

I didn’t lack focus.
I lacked language.

Learning the language of operations didn’t change the work I was doing.
It changed my confidence in naming it.

Today, people call it ops. Or Chief of Staff. Or fractional COO.
Back then, it was just fixing what mattered and caring about the outcome.

If you’re early in your career and your job description makes no sense, you’re not necessarily behind.
You might just be learning the parts most roles don’t bother to teach.

If you’re a founder and someone on your team keeps noticing things, fixing gaps, and carrying more context than their title suggests…pay attention.

That’s not noise.
That’s leadership showing up early.

P.s. I had fun coming up with a creative image for this piece. Inspired by Shannon Bindler ‘s note that mentioned sitting with your younger self, I gave young Katie a lil hug. Half of me says, “mmm that’s creepy.” The other half is definitely not crying at how sweet it is. You did alright, girl. You did alright. Please enjoy my awkward moment…