Operations
The Hive that keeps the business humming.
Support, finance, internal ops, recruiting. The unglamorous work that compounds when you systematize it.
The Operations Hive is the catch-all for back-office work, the kind of recurring, structured, "we do this every week" stuff that's expensive in human hours but ideally suited to agents that can run it on a schedule. If you find yourself saying "someone should be doing X consistently and we're not," that's an Operations task.
The roster
| Role | What they do |
|---|---|
| Support Specialist | Triages incoming tickets, drafts responses, escalates what needs a human. |
| Finance Analyst | Pulls financial reports, reconciles transactions, drafts board-update slides. |
| People Ops | Drafts job descriptions, sources candidates, summarizes interview feedback. |
| Office Manager | Vendor management, contract renewals, calendar wrangling, internal comms. |
| Internal Comms | Drafts company updates, change announcements, all-hands prep. |
| Process Owner | Documents workflows, writes SOPs, audits gaps between policy and practice. |
You'll probably use two or three of these depending on what you outsource to the Hive.
What the Hive handles well
- Support triage - sweep the inbox every hour, draft initial responses, escalate the tough ones.
- Recurring reports - weekly financial digest, monthly metrics rollup, quarterly investor update.
- Hiring funnel - JD drafts, candidate sourcing, structured interview prep, feedback summaries.
- Internal comms - company updates, change announcements, all-hands talking points.
- SOPs and process docs - turn a tribal-knowledge workflow into a written process.
It's less suited for high-judgment, low-frequency decisions (firing, executive comms, legal). The Operations Hive is leverage for routine work, don't ask it to handle the irreversible stuff alone.
Setup checklist
Get the most out of the Operations Hive by:
- Connecting your support tool (Zendesk, Front, Intercom) for the support triage flow.
- Uploading your financials (or connecting a read-only accounting source) for finance work.
- Setting up recurring tasks for the cadence work - daily inbox sweep, weekly metrics digest, monthly all-hands prep.
- Linking your HRIS if you want the People Ops role to read the org chart.
Example tasks
- "Sweep the support inbox. Draft responses to the easy tickets; flag the rest as needing human attention."
- "Pull last month's revenue, expenses, runway. Draft the finance section of the board update."
- "Draft a JD for a Senior Designer. Use our company values and the candidate profile in this doc."
- "Document our new-customer-onboarding process. Talk to recent customers via their thread history and write an SOP."
What's next
Operations work is the highest-leverage area to combine with Recurring: most ops tasks should run on a schedule, not on demand. Set those up and reclaim the hours.