Riikka Söderlund
Chief operating officer at Katana Cloud Inventory. Two decades in marketing before operations, and one of the few COOs to arrive by that route.
Between Two COOs episodes featuring Riikka Söderlund
About Riikka Söderlund
Riikka Söderlund is the chief operating officer at Katana Cloud Inventory, where she runs the commercial side of the business. Katana is a Finland-based platform that helps small product businesses manage inventory, manufacturing, and multi-channel sales, with merchants in over 70 countries and more than $3 billion in gross merchandise value flowing through it.
She spent two decades in marketing before moving into operations. She started in Helsinki ad agencies, then spent a decade in consumer marketing, including a period running digital and communications for a Finnish beauty brand exporting into the United States. She joined Katana as VP of marketing and later served as CMO before taking the COO role.
She is a communications major by training, and she treats narrative building as the skill that transferred most directly from marketing into operations. Her argument is that the job of a COO is largely influence, of teams, customers, partners, and boards, and that the discipline of packaging a message is what makes that possible. She is currently training in product management for the same reason she once trained in revenue operations, which is that she expects the role to need it next.
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