Rewriting the revenue operations job description: Art Harding of People.ai

Most people write a revenue operations job description as a list of systems and reports. Art Harding's version is three words long and completely changes what the function is for.

Harding is COO at People.ai, the revenue intelligence platform that crossed a billion dollar valuation with $200 million in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, ICONIQ and Akkadian Ventures. He has led global sales, services and operations teams at Symantec, VMware, Riverbed Technology and New Relic.

Preparing for a war before it started

This conversation was recorded shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and People.ai's founder and CEO Oleg Rogynskyy is Ukrainian. Harding opens by condemning the war and by asking that the subject be treated with humility, and then describes what the company did.

The preparation began in November, months before the conflict opened. Harding attributes it partly to culture. People.ai is a bias-for-action company that plans against multiple scenarios, modeling a worst case, a midpoint and an ideal outcome before large decisions. Early warning signals came from the people who track these things, alongside what was surfacing in the news.

What they did with that time is the substance.

They started with people rather than systems, though the systems mattered. Business continuity and disaster recovery plans were already in place, so questions about where technology runs and how it is secured were settled. That freed them to sit down with employees, both those in Ukraine and those outside any likely impact zone, and explain what the available information suggested might happen.

Then they gave people options, including relocation out of the country, months in advance. Harding is careful about the boundary here. You cannot make decisions about someone's personal life for them. What a company can do is create the conditions that make different choices possible.

People responded differently, which was expected. Some took the options immediately. Some chose to watch and later changed their minds as conditions deteriorated. Some continued running parts of the business as a matter of pride and, he suspects, useful distraction. Others chose to fight for their country or join relief efforts, with the company's support.

Alongside that, the leadership team divided responsibility deliberately so that not everyone was focused on the same thing. Given his background, the CEO took Ukraine and employees. Harding took customers and prospects.

The mantra they repeated internally is worth quoting in substance: the best thing the company can do is make sure teammates have a company, jobs, customers and prospects to come back to. Cover for people while they are out, and keep doing the work.

They also pointed employees toward vetted humanitarian channels for those who had energy for more than their day job, after the work was done, and Harding singles out the people team for the practical work of paying employees wherever they now were and keeping track of them and their families.

Meeting the CEO as a customer

Harding met Oleg while running go to market strategy and operations at New Relic, as a prospective customer. People.ai was early, probably Series B, just landing its first large accounts.

The introduction happened because Harding, during the sales process, started asking why they were not doing more, bigger and faster, which quickly got him a meeting with the CEO.

His description of that meeting is one of the better lines in the episode. He had been accused of being high energy for years and wore it proudly, until he met Oleg and realized that what he considered energetic was Oleg's middle gear.

He is equally quick to deflect the resume. When he hears an introduction saying he took companies from $50 million to a billion, his correction is that he was a leader in some regards and largely along for the ride with a lot of other capable people.

The thesis that drew him in came from watching New Relic. Agile development, better instrumentation and observability had changed how software gets built, through companies like New Relic, AppDynamics and Datadog. Harding kept asking why the same principles were not being applied to go to market, where instrumentation was poor and annual plans were still built like a waterfall project. His conclusion was that a go to market organization dependent on human manual effort would always be held back.

What made the partnership work was not similarity. Different ages, different backgrounds, one raised in Ukraine and one in New England. What they shared was a view of the problem. Harding's generalization: one of the strongest forms of common ground is a shared passion for solving the same problem, and if the north star matches you can accommodate very different personalities and working styles.

Default timeframes

This is a small idea with disproportionate value, and I have not heard it articulated this way before.

Harding's observation is that everyone has a default timeframe they are most comfortable operating in, and that a large share of apparent disagreement is actually people using the same words to mean different durations.

His example: ask what someone means by the short term. For an R&D leader, short term might be a year. For a serial entrepreneur, short term might be this weekend. Two people can agree completely on the most important thing to do in the short term and be describing incompatible plans.

So in leadership meetings, People.ai works to eliminate those vague terms, breaking short, medium and long term into specifics that can be actioned.

The related idea is communication as a symphony rather than a hierarchy. Harding's alternative is not that the king speaks, then the prince, then the queen, then the various subjects. It is asking what the conversation actually is. An analyst briefing, a company all hands, a review of last quarter, a discussion of strategy. Then matching it to whichever executive naturally communicates in that register.

The result is that audiences learn what to expect from whom. When Harding speaks at an all hands, people anticipate business performance from last quarter and next. When Oleg opens his mouth, they are listening for the far future.

From alignment to integration

Harding's position on the sales and marketing question is that the debate is a decade out of date.

It crystallized when one of his account executives said, on a discovery call, that hearing the phrase marketing and sales alignment makes him cringe.

Harding's argument: if you are still trying to align sales and marketing, you are falling behind organizations that aligned some time ago and have moved on to integration. Groups still working on alignment are usually still debating shared goals, shared vocabulary and business process integration, which are the fundamentals that everything else depends on.

He goes further on where the value actually comes from. Software, automation and data do not deliver value on their own. Value comes from applying them to a new way of thinking and to partnerships that did not previously exist. Without the fundamentals settled, the tooling has nothing to amplify.

Underneath it all he puts respect. His observation about how much effort the industry spends managing friction between departments is that it is usually spent by people who have not tried to understand what the other department's job is actually like, and are quick to state what they want out of the partnership before understanding the trade-offs the other side is making. His phrase for the resulting dynamic: success has many friends, but failure is an orphan.

Friction you should welcome, and friction you should not

Michael pushes on the received wisdom about healthy friction between sales and marketing, and Harding gives it a precise definition using an analogy he apologizes for in advance.

He is not a NASCAR fan, and suspects it is because he would get bored. First lap, interesting. Second lap, he has seen this. By the third lap experiencing the same thing, his patience is gone and he would turn the car around just to see something different.

Friction is inevitable in a scaling business, arriving from competitors, from the market, from new hires. The question is whether you can evolve past it and earn the right to solve new problems.

His framing of a normal workday is the honest one. You do not arrive to find every light green and every switch set to yes. You arrive knowing you will be solving problems, and the only question is which ones. New problems are a signal of progress. Repeating the same friction is a grind.

The related point is about metrics. When sales and marketing fixate on leads delivered or stage two close rates, those numbers stop feeding anything. Harding's north star is the buyer and customer journey, from first interest through self-serve discovery to a sales cycle, which he calls a very precious time for the customer. When leaders fail to make the buyer the star of the show, teams retreat into arguing about their own inputs.

He is blunt about the mechanism that causes this: an obsession with attribution. Attribution is a good signal for directing investment and a bad basis for teamwork.

The path in, and never wanting the job

Harding never set out to be a COO, and says he is genuinely surprised when people ask him to mentor them toward the role.

He also describes a deliberate mindset shift he shared with his wife of more than 25 years: he decided to view the job as the most interesting job in the world rather than the most undoable one, on the grounds that the second framing would leave him operating from a contracted mindset.

The path itself started in services. Billable consulting, project management, practice development. His argument for why that produces good operators is that services businesses have thin margins and cannot be run sloppily.

Curiosity about higher margin businesses took him to software, first through the services arm, then into overlay roles writing statements of work and supporting sales, then into carrying a quota directly at Symantec and VMware. Missing leadership and international work took him to Riverbed's professional services team, where he moved from leading the Americas to leading globally.

The turn into operations came when Riverbed was acquired by a private equity firm, which asked him to take over sales operations. He has been in operations since. And then People.ai, a company whose problem he cared enough about as a customer to go and join.

Why product-led growth is not a universal answer

Asked whether enterprise selling could become entirely product-led, Harding's answer is no, and his reasoning applies well beyond this question.

He is suspicious of the words universal, all, everything, never and forever. Technology trends, in his image, are glaciers. They move through the industry, make a large impact, then melt away leaving boulders behind, artifacts that persist for years.

He also names the specific failure mode. People arrive from a company where a particular motion worked spectacularly and try to port that recipe wholesale, when what actually determines the answer is what you sell and to whom.

The specific trap in product-led growth is that the user voting with clicks and small transactions is frequently not the person who will make an enterprise purchase, and their priorities differ. He also notes the symmetry that gets forgotten: sales-led companies have to worry about actual adoption and consumption, and product-led companies discover that easy come is easy go, since fast-onboarding trial users also churn fast. Packaging those users into an enterprise offer usually means building a genuinely new product, new features or a new value proposition, whichever direction you are moving.

Treat content like a product

Harding's view on launches follows from the same integration argument, applied to R&D and go to market.

Product market fit on one thing puts real wind in a company's sails, whether that thing is databases, CRM, storage or backup. The next question is whether the company can introduce something new, built or acquired, and whether R&D and go to market can do it together.

An early mentor gave him the operating principle: treat content like a product. Messaging should be iterating while engineers are iterating on the earliest builds against their requirements documents.

Which leads to his sharpest reframe. A product is not released when the code ships. It is released when people are using it. He wonders aloud why the industry celebrates software releases rather than the first three customer references and case studies, and is happy to celebrate milestones along the way while insisting the mission is not complete until R&D and go to market have landed those first customers together.

The practical consequence: if marketing is only starting on campaign messaging, pricing on packaging, and customer success on renewal impact after launch, you have delayed your own growth by definition.

The revenue operations job description, in three words

This is the part to take away.

Harding rejects the standard metaphors for operations. Not connective tissue. Not a deli counter where people place an order and ask for it without cheese. His objection is that those framings put operators on their heels rather than their toes.

His first assertion is that if you run sales ops, rev ops, or the COO function, your first job is leadership of people, and he thinks this fails to reach the top of the priority list in operations far more often than in other departments.

His second is a charter he abbreviates as E squared T. Any project the operations team invests in should do one of three things:

• Efficiency. Make something faster or cheaper.
• Effectiveness. Help the business achieve or exceed a goal.
• Transformation. Change the organization for the future.

A project can hit more than one. What matters is that this replaces what he calls the title executive ranking prioritization scheme, where the loudest and most senior executive gets their projects done and operational capacity is allocated by who asked rather than by what matters.

He adds a third requirement, which is the hard one: the courage and integrity to manage the boundaries of your capacity and prioritize honestly within them.

The brand he wants for the function is the department of clarity. Do we know where we actually are. Do we know what is true, before we start solving. Do we have a clear definition of success. And what risks, whether timeline, budget or execution, are we willing to carry between here and there.

His alternative to connective tissue is that great operations leaders think like product managers, owning go to market and general business capabilities as a product they bring to market effectively.

Inspection without coaching is micromanagement

Harding produced this line on stage during a sales methodology rollout, and it stuck.

The context was training frontline sales managers to coach, people whose job descriptions already assume it. His observation is that formal training for frontline managers is sparse, and that if you interview them their descriptions of the job vary enormously. The consultants he was working with insisted that telemetry, metrics and measurement would achieve nothing if managers did not know how to use them as coaches.

His argument by analogy is clean. Nobody hires a guitar teacher to be told they are bad at guitar, or a financial planner to be told they are broke, or a trainer to be told they are unfit.

The old model made sense in an uninstrumented world. Here is your quota, your bag and your account list, see you in ninety days. That was necessarily outcome-based because nothing else was visible.

Now the telemetry exists. You can see who someone is meeting, what good looks like, what a healthy ramp looks like. Which means the leader's job has changed, from sourcing talent and swapping it out when it fails, to coaching against leading indicators while there is still time to change the outcome. Showing up after it is too late reduces a manager to reading the scoreboard.

He also offers a generous reframe of a common complaint. Older leaders describe younger employees as needy for feedback. Harding, who went to college before cell phones, suggests the alternative reading: they grew up with continuous telemetry, have experienced coaching arriving at the right moment and changing their trajectory, and are hungry for that rather than for praise.

His example of what good looks like: instead of telling someone they missed their number, tell them it looks like they are struggling to convert follow-up meetings with people at VP level and above, and work on that specific skill.

The 5 things I took away from this conversation

1. E squared T is the best filter for operations work I have heard. Every request has to make something faster or cheaper, help hit a goal, or change the company for the future. It replaces prioritization by seniority with prioritization by purpose, and it gives an operations leader language for saying no.

2. Ask what timeframe someone means. Half of executive disagreement is two people using short term to mean a weekend and a year. Banning the vague words in leadership meetings and forcing specifics is nearly free and would fix a startling amount of friction.

3. Repeat friction is the signal, not friction itself. New problems mean you are moving. The same problem on the third lap means you have not earned the right to solve anything new. That is a useful diagnostic to run on your own week.

4. Inspection without coaching is micromanagement. Once you can see leading indicators, telling someone their result at the end of the period is not management, it is scorekeeping. The telemetry only pays off if it changes what you say to someone while they can still act on it.

5. A product is released when customers use it, not when it ships. Celebrating the first three references instead of the code drop would change what teams optimize for, and it forces messaging, pricing and customer success to be ready in parallel rather than starting after launch.

FAQ

What belongs in a revenue operations job description? Harding's charter is efficiency, effectiveness and transformation. Every project should make something faster or cheaper, help the business hit or exceed a goal, or change the organization for the future. He explicitly excludes taking orders from whichever executive asks loudest, and puts leadership of the operations team itself as the first responsibility.

What are the core revenue operations responsibilities beyond systems and reporting? Establishing clarity about where the business actually is before solving anything, defining what success looks like, and naming the timeline, budget and execution risks between the current state and the goal. Harding wants the function branded as the department of clarity rather than as connective tissue or a support function.

What is the difference between sales and marketing alignment and integration? Alignment means still negotiating shared goals, shared vocabulary and business process. Integration means those are settled and the teams operate against a common objective, converting expanding pipeline into expanding revenue. Harding argues that companies still working on alignment are behind, and that tooling cannot compensate for missing fundamentals.

Can enterprise software go fully product-led? Harding says no. The user voting with clicks is often not the enterprise economic buyer, and their priorities differ. Product-led motions also see fast churn alongside fast onboarding, so converting that base into enterprise revenue generally means building a genuinely new product or value proposition rather than simply repackaging.

How should managers use sales telemetry? To coach while there is still time to change the outcome, not to report results after the fact. Harding's standard is specific and behavioral, such as identifying that someone is not converting follow-up meetings with senior buyers and working on that skill, rather than telling them at quarter end that they missed the number.

Also mentioned

• People.ai, and investors Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed and ICONIQ
• New Relic, AppDynamics and Datadog, the observability companies whose principles Harding wanted applied to go to market
• Symantec, VMware and Riverbed Technology, earlier stops on his path into operations
• Jobs to be done thinking about buyer versus user personas, relevant to his product-led growth argument
• Art Harding on the People.ai LinkedIn page

Listen to the full episode

Art Harding on Between Two COO's

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