Zulema Quintans
COO of Noda, an energy management software company for commercial buildings. Former dancer at Juilliard, with operating and strategy roles at Arcadia, American Express, and Bain and Company.
Between Two COOs episodes featuring Zulema Quintans
About Zulema Quintans
Zulema Quintans is the chief operating officer of Noda, an energy management software company for the commercial built environment. She leads product, operations, and customer functions as Noda helps building operators stop the 30 to 50 percent of energy that commercial buildings waste before it happens.
Her path to operations was not a straight line. She trained as a dancer at The Juilliard School and spent the first half of her career as a professional ballet dancer before moving into business. She went on to consulting at Bain and Company, seven years at American Express, and operating and strategy roles at the climate technology company Arcadia. She holds an MBA and a master in public policy from Harvard.
At Noda she runs OKRs as a working operating system rather than a quarterly ritual, tying every goal to a specific owner and roadmap and putting the OKRs directly into the performance management system. She is direct about where AI helps and where it does not. Her team uses AI to automate work that used to take engineers weeks, but her bet is that the winners in AI will be the companies that pair the technology with a strong service layer, not the ones chasing the model alone.
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