The Hire That Doesn't Fix It
Every operations leader has done it. The team is stretched. Emails are falling through the gaps. Processes that used to work stopped scaling somewhere around 40 people. The natural response: post a job for an Operations Coordinator.
And for a few weeks — sometimes months — it helps. Things get tracked. Emails get answered. The coordinator absorbs the noise. But six months later, you're hiring again. Or the coordinator has burned out. Or the original problem has simply moved one layer down.
The issue isn't the hire. The issue is what the hire was supposed to solve.
"Adding a person to a broken process doesn't fix the process. It creates a human dependency on top of a structural fault."
The Real Problem Is Upstream
When operations feel chaotic, it's rarely because you don't have enough people managing the chaos. It's because the systems generating the chaos aren't designed well.
Processes that require constant human intervention to stay on track are not processes — they're procedures held together by institutional knowledge and personal effort. They work fine at 20 people. They start cracking at 50. They collapse at 100.
Common upstream problems
- Approval workflows that live in someone's head or inbox
- Data that exists in three systems but never automatically syncs
- Handoffs between teams that depend on a weekly sync call
- Status tracking done by manually updating a spreadsheet
Each of these is a design problem. Not a staffing problem. Hiring someone to navigate broken design doesn't fix the design — it just ensures the workarounds are more consistently applied.
The Coordinator Trap
Here's what usually happens after the hire. The new coordinator is sharp. They pick things up quickly. They document what they learn, build their own shortcuts, and become remarkably good at managing the dysfunction.
Now you have two problems: the original broken process, and a single person who is the only one who knows how to navigate it. The dependency has deepened. The bus factor is now one.
When that coordinator eventually leaves — and they will, because high-functioning people in dysfunction-management roles burn out — you lose the process entirely. You're back to square one, hiring again, and onboarding someone into chaos that has grown slightly more complex.
What Actually Needs Fixing
Before you post the job, map the problem. Specifically: where are decisions getting stuck? Where is data being moved manually that should move automatically? Where are handoffs failing?
In our experience working with B2B companies at scale, the answer is almost always one of three things:
- A missing or misconfigured integration. Two systems that should talk to each other don't. A person fills the gap. Fix: build the integration.
- An approval flow that has no structure. Decisions travel by email and Slack, accumulate in inboxes, and get lost. Fix: design the approval flow explicitly and enforce it in tooling.
- A reporting process that requires manual assembly. Someone spends hours every week pulling numbers from different places. Fix: connect the sources to a single reporting layer.
In each case, the solution is a systems change, not a headcount change. Once the system works, the human overhead drops — permanently, not just until the next hire.
When the Hire Makes Sense
This isn't an argument against hiring operations people. It's an argument for sequencing the work correctly.
A great ops hire — someone who comes in with process discipline and systems thinking — can be transformative. But only if they're hired to design and improve, not to absorb and endure.
The right time to hire is after you've understood your operational failures clearly enough to describe them precisely. Not "we're overwhelmed" — but "our customer onboarding fails at the document collection step because we have no structured handoff between sales and operations."
The Takeaway
If you're about to hire an ops coordinator because things feel chaotic, pause for two weeks first. Spend that time mapping the chaos — not managing it. Trace every failure to its source. Ask whether a better-designed system would eliminate the need for the role entirely.
Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes you genuinely need the person. But often, you'll find that three to five systems changes would do more than any hire — and would make the eventual hire far more effective.
Operations should scale through design, not headcount. The companies that figure that out early are the ones that don't spend the next three years re-hiring for the same problem.
