--- title: "The Operational Skill That Separates Good COOs From Great Ones" url: "https://cooinsider.com/insight/the-operational-skill-that-separates-good-coos-from-great-ones/" author: "Daniel Haiem" published: "2026-09-17" updated: "2026-09-17" --- # The Operational Skill That Separates Good COOs From Great Ones There is a version of operational excellence that every business school case study celebrates: the well-designed process, the clear accountability structure, the documented playbook that lets a growing team execute consistently without constant leadership intervention. These are genuine achievements, and building them is a core part of what operations leaders are paid to do. There is also a version of operational excellence that quietly makes organizations brittle. It looks almost identical to the first version from the inside, and it only reveals itself when the business encounters something it did not plan for. The difference between the two is not the quality of the systems. It is whether the operations leader deliberately preserved the capacity to respond to what they could not anticipate when the systems were built. ### **Why Systematizing Everything Is a Trap at Scale** The instinct to systematize is correct in principle and dangerous in excess. Every process a COO designs is a bet on the future: a bet that the inputs, the team, the market conditions, and the strategic priorities that made this process make sense today will remain sufficiently stable that the process will still serve the business six months from now. Most of the time, that bet pays off. Processes that handle routine, recurring decisions well free up leadership attention for the decisions that actually require judgment. That is the point. The problem emerges when the systematization instinct extends to decisions and workflows that are not actually routine, even if they appear to be. Growth-stage businesses encounter this most acutely. A process built for a team of twenty does not necessarily scale to a team of sixty. A vendor management workflow built around three suppliers does not accommodate twelve. A planning cadence designed for a single product line creates friction when a second one is added mid-year. The COOs who navigate this well are not the ones who built better processes. They are the ones who built processes while simultaneously asking: what would we need to change about this if the business looked significantly different in twelve months, and have we made that change easy or hard? ### **What Optionality Management Actually Looks Like** Optionality management is not a formal framework. It is a question that runs alongside every operational decision: are we solving this problem in a way that keeps our future options open, or in a way that forecloses them? In practice, it shows up as a specific set of habits that distinguish operations leaders who scale well from those who find their own systems working against them. **They build reversibility into process design wherever the cost of reversibility is low.** Not every process needs an exit ramp. Some decisions are genuinely irreversible and should be treated as such. But many operational choices that get implemented as permanent structures could have been implemented as time-bounded experiments with a built-in review date, at essentially no additional cost. The COO who defaults to "let's run this for ninety days and reassess" on anything that isn't truly permanent is building an organization that can adapt without requiring a formal change management process every time conditions shift. **They maintain explicit slack in the system.** One of the most reliable signals that an operations function has been over-optimized is that there is no slack anywhere. Every person is at capacity. Every process is running at full load. Every vendor relationship is being fully utilized. This looks like efficiency from the outside and feels like efficiency from the inside, right up until the moment something unexpected happens and there is no capacity anywhere in the system to absorb it. The best operations leaders treat a small amount of deliberate slack not as waste but as insurance, the operational equivalent of keeping cash on the balance sheet. **They separate the planning cadence from the execution cadence.** Many organizations conflate these two rhythms, which means that when execution is under pressure, planning gets compressed or skipped entirely. This is exactly backwards. The moments when execution is most pressured are the moments when planning is most valuable, because those are the moments when the business is encountering something outside the normal operating parameters. COOs who protect the planning cadence as a distinct, inviolable rhythm build organizations that get smarter under pressure rather than just faster. ### **The Conversation That Reveals the Gap** There is a diagnostic question worth asking of any operations function to surface whether optionality is being preserved or eroded: "If our top strategic priority changed significantly in the next ninety days, which of our current operational commitments would make that hardest to execute on?" Most operations leaders can answer this question quickly, which is a good sign. The concern is when the answer reveals that a significant portion of the team's capacity, vendor relationships, or process infrastructure is locked into executing a current priority in a way that would require substantial unwinding to redirect. That unwinding cost is optionality that was spent without being accounted for. And while some amount of commitment is necessary to execute anything at all, the operations leaders who scale most effectively are the ones who treat that unwinding cost as a real number that belongs in every significant operational decision, not an afterthought that appears when circumstances change. ### **What This Means for How COOs Plan** The practical implication is not to systematize less or to avoid operational commitment. It is to build a second question into every significant operational decision alongside the standard "does this solve the problem well?": "Does this keep our options open, and if not, is the foreclosed optionality worth the cost?" That question will not always change the decision. Often the most effective solution to an operational problem is also the one that preserves the most flexibility, because elegant systems tend to be modular by design. But asking it consistently surfaces the cases where the most efficient solution in the short term is also the one that creates the most organizational brittleness over time. The COOs building the most resilient operations functions in 2026 are not the ones with the most sophisticated systems. They are the ones who built those systems while keeping one hand on the exit ramp, because they understood that the value of a great process is not just what it enables today, but how cheaply it can be changed when tomorrow looks different than expected. --- Daniel Haiem is the CEO of[ AppMakers](https://appmakersla.com), an app development company that works with founders and enterprise teams on mobile and web builds. He is known for pairing product clarity with delivery discipline, helping teams make smart scope calls and ship what matters. Earlier in his career, he taught physics, and he still spends time supporting education and youth mentorship initiatives.