BizOps As The Connective Tissue In Startups: Bryan Chung
Leveraging BizOps To Scale PMF
Hey friends! I’m Akash, partnering with founders at the earliest stages at Earlybird.
Software Synthesis is where I connect the dots on software and company building strategy.
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Today we’re discussing BizOps with Bryan Chung.
In our discussion last year with Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of Stripe, she placed huge emphasis on the role BizOps played in scaling the company through hypergrowth. She went on to say that a Head of BizOps is well positioned to become the COO post PMF.
Bryan’s seen first hand the role BizOps played in Figma’s expansion into new markets, and more. Thank you Bryan for these wonderful insights!
Bryan is a strategic operator with over 11 years of experience and a strong track record of scaling high-growth companies. Previously, as one of the earliest BizOps hires at Figma, he played a key role in shaping the company’s go-to-market and growth strategy, while leading international expansion efforts. His work included launching offices in the UK, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney. Over five years, Bryan helped drive Figma’s hypergrowth, scaling the company from 80 to 1,500+ employees and achieving triple-digit top-line CAGR. Now based in Amsterdam and splitting his time with Los Angeles, he advises early-stage startups. You can find him on Linkedin.
How would you define BizOps in the context of high growth tech companies and how has this definition evolved over time?
BizOps is a broad term, and the role varies a lot across companies. But at its core, BizOps is about adding flexibility as a company works towards product-market fit. That could mean scaling customer acquisition channels, fine-tuning team operations, or refining the overall cadence of the business. The specifics really depend on the company’s stage, sector, and even the reporting structure.
At the end of the day, the main goal is always the same: helping the company make faster, more informed decisions. It's really about supporting decision-making.
In earlier stage companies, BizOps often plays the "jack of all trades" role. You’re usually one of the first few non-product, non-engineering hires, and you take on everything operational. This can range from setting up payroll to supporting fundraising to managing external counsel.
As companies grow, BizOps bridges the gap between organisational structure and business objectives – in other words, flexing into roles that aren’t yet proven out or hired for. That could mean setting up new processes or testing new strategies. For example, at Figma, when I joined, they had just launched their first enterprise SKU. We had maybe one or two sales reps but no sales ops, no CRM, no formal sales strategy. My role for the first six months was to set up Salesforce, run quota models, prioritise accounts—basically, lay the groundwork for the sales process. I did this until we had about 30 sales reps and eventually hired a sales ops team.
Similarly with marketing, before we had a growth marketing function, I ran our first ads, set the budget, and tested platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Once we saw the value, we hired a dedicated growth marketer.
Later, as we approached the pre-IPO stage, BizOps shifted toward long-term strategic planning. We started thinking about different sales motions, tapping into international markets, and evolving pricing frameworks as we became more of a multi-product platform.
So, BizOps really lends itself to being that adaptable "jack of all trades" role—what I'd call a business athlete in high-growth environments.
Given your experience at Figma driving expansion into new markets, can you touch on the role of BizOps in this process?
I was lucky to be involved in Figma’s international expansion from day one. My role spanned everything from writing the business case for our first international office in London to eventually opening five more offices across Europe and Asia Pacific. BizOps played a huge role in shaping the international strategy—figuring out which markets to enter, how to approach them, and what localisation efforts (either product or go-to-market) we needed to prioritise—and then executing on it.
We prioritised certain markets by analysing our internal data to see where natural traction was happening, and overlaying that with external data like audience size, language proficiency, etc., to calculate Figma’s revenue potential. Another super helpful exercise to contextualise some of the hard data was interviewing folks at peer companies to learn what had worked and what hadn’t when they entered certain markets. We were fortunate to have VCs who connected us with these experts, and many people at Figma had prior experience at high-growth SaaS companies, so we tapped into that network as well. Learning from their successes and mistakes was critical in making the right decisions, and it really paid off.
Since you probably had to hire BizOps professionals, what combination of skills is necessary to succeed, and how do they maybe differ from folks who are far more specialized?
What makes BizOps unique is that you're operating both horizontally across teams and also vertically in the organisation. This means you need to get hands-on and comfortable diving deep into areas like marketing or sales. You’re not just gathering insights—you’re connecting the dots and making sure everything runs smoothly, so nothing falls through the cracks.
The role requires a high comfort level with ambiguity. You need to be able to connect different parts of the business and navigate competing priorities. This is different from more specialized roles like sales ops or marketing ops, which are focused on specific functions. BizOps requires a broader, more holistic view because you’re not directly reporting to a specific team like sales or marketing. This allows for a neutral perspective and a position that’s less easily dictated by specific functions’ incentives, making it easier to challenge assumptions and prioritise what's best for the business as a whole.
As a company scales and the BizOps function also evolves, how have you seen the evolution of team structure, focus areas, and how deeply they become integrated into other teams inside the company?
In scale-ups, these teams are usually pretty lean. The problems are often unique and you never know what the next challenge will be as priorities are quite fluid and change monthly or sometimes weekly. Therefore, you tend to see these jack-of-all-trades professionals because specialisation is tough early on. At Figma, our team stayed lean and versatile, but over time, I think people naturally built strong relationships with execs or found project areas they liked working on, which led to an informal degree of specialisation.
As companies grow, specialisation becomes inevitable though. You start seeing BizOps teams segment into areas like go-to-market or product. Some even develop expertise in specific domains like pricing or systems architecture. It all depends on the company’s maturity and what’s needed. But even as BizOps teams specialise, their core responsibility remains the same—connecting and aligning different parts of the organization. I’ve heard BizOps described as the "connective tissue" of a company, and I think that’s a perfect way to put it.
A lot of founders will look for signals that tell them it's time to hire that BizOps person. How do you typically advise founders to think about the right timing and then how they assess the right profile for their specific needs?
The decision to hire a BizOps leader usually comes when founders need to connect the dots across the organization or bring clarity on storylines—whether for internal alignment, board presentations, or fundraising. As I mentioned earlier, it’s also about extending the capabilities of existing teams or rather, plugging organisational gaps as companies hit inflection points and want to validate specific needs.
As for timing, there should be some level of product-market fit first and I generally advise founders to hire for this role sooner rather than later. It’s easier for someone to scale with the company than to bring them in too late and have them play catch-up–-or worse, need to rip things out.
If it’s your first BizOps hire, I’d recommend bringing in someone with enough experience to provide strategic oversight but importantly still willing to get their hands dirty to execute themselves—really, someone who can grow alongside the company.
Performance measurement or quantifying success or measuring ROI - how have you seen that become sophisticated when you're thinking about BizOps being evaluated?
Yeah, that’s a hard one! Measuring the success of BizOps is tricky because the goal isn’t to "run marketing" or "run product." We’re more of a partner to these teams—we provide insights, drive operational improvements, and help align different functions. BizOps success should be evaluated based on how well their cross-functional partners perform on key business metrics, like revenue growth, acquisition, or operational efficiency.
That said, I like to think about how much leverage the team provides. Are they involved in high-level strategic decisions, or are they getting stuck in low-impact tasks? This is where I often see BizOps teams go wrong—when they grow too large and start working on low-priority tasks that don’t really move the needle.
So, the focus should be on how well their cross-functional partners are performing and how effectively the BizOps team is being leveraged across the organization.
Are there any tactics that enable BizOps to succeed? How would you approach the enablement for a BizOps person?
One of the keys to success in BizOps is the ability to influence without direct authority. What sets someone apart in this role is their capacity to build trust and drive change across the company.
When it comes to onboarding, I think it’s much more effective to get new hires involved in real, "easy win" projects from the start rather than having them spend a week just reading onboarding docs. This way, they’re able to quickly get to know the business, start building relationships, and gain early momentum rather than just passively absorb information. Doing something like this also gives a new hire an artifact that they can speak to in their meet and greets and ideally, could prompt new ideas to explore.
I also think it’s important for new hires to meet both functional leaders they’ll be working with as well as more junior team members. These “lieutenants” are often the ones who can help teach and execute on day-to-day work. The combination of early involvement and relationship-building across different levels of the org sets them up for success and helps them build the trust they need to make an impact.
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