Director, Business Operations - Operational Excellence

Chicago

Role:
Director, Business Operations — Operational Excellence

Location:
Chicago, IL — Hybrid

About the Role

The Business Operations team at IG North America works on many of the company's biggest opportunities and challenges. We help shape where the company is headed, identify new ways to grow, and make sure the entire organization is aligned. This role reports to the head of Business Operations and calls for someone who can think about the company's future while also getting critical work done day to day.

The team moves between building multiyear plans and driving execution, depending on what the business needs most.

This particular role is the team's depth expert on operational performance: how our operating teams run day to day, what it costs to serve our customers, and where better tooling, process, or data can unlock efficiency. You'll partner closely with the leaders of our operational teams, and their teams directly, as a hands-on partner, not just a strategist handing down recommendations.

What You'll Do

Operational tooling and efficiency

• Identify where manual, duplicative, or broken workflows are slowing down operational teams, and lead the build or rollout of new tools and systems to fix them.
• Partner with Engineering, Data, and operational leaders to scope, prioritize, and implement automation that reduces cost and improves speed or quality.
• Own the roadmap for operational tooling investments, including making the build versus buy case to leadership.

Cost to serve and unit economics

• Define and maintain a cost to serve model across our operational functions, down to the channel, segment, or customer level.
• Identify where costs are out of line with value delivered, and build the business case for changes to staffing, process, or technology.
• Partner with Finance to connect operational metrics to P&L impact, and keep leadership honest about tradeoffs.

Operational tracking and performance management

• Design the KPIs, dashboards, and reporting cadences operational teams use to run their business day to day.
• Work with the data team to build reporting infrastructure that gives leadership and frontline managers the same source of truth, in near real time.
• Stand up operating reviews, such as weekly and monthly business reviews, that turn data into decisions and accountability.

Cross functional execution

• Lead process redesigns that span multiple operational teams, from root cause diagnosis through implementation and measured impact.
• Support new product or market launches by building the operational playbook, including staffing models, SLAs, tooling, and performance targets, before go live.
• Take on special projects that support the CEO's and operating leaders' top priorities.

Broader Biz Ops work

• Contribute to company strategy, market evaluation, and planning processes alongside the rest of the Biz Ops team.
• Support partnership or M&A evaluation when operational integration or cost to serve diligence is needed.

Who You Are

To succeed in this role, you need real depth in operations. You've built cost to serve models, rolled out tooling, or run performance management systems before, and you know the difference between a dashboard that looks good and one that changes behavior. You pair that operational fluency with the influence, communication, and analytical skills the rest of the Biz Ops team relies on.

A qualified candidate has 8+ years of work experience, including a meaningful chunk in an operations, ops strategy, or shared services role, and should be able to:

• Lead complex, cross functional projects from diagnosis through implementation and measured impact, specifically in an operational context, such as tooling rollouts, process redesign, or cost structure changes.
• Build and maintain cost to serve or unit economics models, and use them to make concrete tradeoff recommendations to leadership.
• Design KPI frameworks and reporting systems that operational teams actually use to run their business, not just report upward.
• Evaluate, scope, and help implement new operational tools and systems, working closely with Engineering and Data.
• Present analyses that help leadership make tough calls, including being ready to disagree when the data points in a different direction.
• Communicate clearly with different audiences, from the CEO and board to frontline operational managers.
• Work comfortably and hands on with data: financial models, customer metrics, and operational dashboards.
• Engage with…