| Detail | For this role |
|---|---|
| Department | Operations |
| Level | Manager |
| Reports to | Head of Operations |
| Direct reports | Business Operations Associate, Operations Analyst |
| Experience | 6 to 10 years across operations, consulting, strategy or analytics roles |
Business Operations Manager job description template
Copy this job description, replace the text in square brackets and post it on your careers page or a job portal.
Job title: Business Operations Manager
Department: Operations
Reports to: Head of Operations
Location: [City], [office, branch or site]
About the role
A Business Operations Manager keeps the company's operating rhythm working: planning, metrics, business reviews and the cross-functional projects no single department owns. Common in technology, services and consumer companies, the role builds the numbers leaders use to decide, finds where growth is lost between teams and runs projects to fix it. A good business operations manager is the person leaders call when a problem spans sales, operations and finance.
Key responsibilities
- Run the monthly and quarterly business review process, including the metrics pack, pre-reads and the action list that follows.
- Own the company's core metric definitions so sales, operations and finance report the same number for the same thing.
- Build quarterly plans and targets with department heads, and follow them through a shared scorecard.
- Investigate drops in conversion, retention, delivery or margin that cross team boundaries, and recommend fixes with named owners.
- Lead cross-functional projects such as entering a new city, launching a service line or changing pricing, from plan to launch.
- Model capacity and headcount needs for upcoming quarters with finance and HR.
- Review vendor and software spend across operations each quarter and close contracts that no longer earn their cost.
- Document processes that connect teams, such as order to cash or lead to onboarding, and remove handoff delays.
- Prepare operations data and narratives for leadership, board and investor updates.
- Coach associates and analysts on problem framing, analysis and stakeholder updates.
Requirements
- Graduate in engineering, commerce or economics
- MBA or PGDM from a recognised institute is preferred
- Experience in consulting or analytics is an advantage
- 6 to 10 years across operations, consulting, strategy or analytics roles
KRAs and KPIs for a Business Operations Manager
Key result areas for the appraisal form, each with a KPI you can measure every month or quarter.
| Key result area | How to measure it |
|---|---|
| Review cadence | Business reviews held on schedule, with 90 percent of actions closed by the next review |
| Metric reliability | No disputes about core metric definitions in leadership reviews after the first quarter |
| Cross-functional projects | Launched projects meet their agreed outcome within one quarter of go-live |
| Plan scorecard | Quarterly plan scorecard published by the fifth working day of each month |
| Spend discipline | Operations vendor and software spend reviewed quarterly, with unused contracts closed |
| Team development | Associates able to run a business review on their own within six months |
Skills and tools
Tools used day to day: Google Sheets or Excel, SQL, Looker Studio, Tableau or Power BI, Notion or Confluence, Jira or Asana.
Reporting line and career path
Next roles: Head of Operations, Chief of Staff, Head of Strategy
Interview questions for a Business Operations Manager
- Revenue grew 20 percent but gross margin fell. How would you investigate why?
- Two departments report different numbers for active customers. How do you settle the definition?
- Tell me about a cross-functional project you led without authority over the people involved.
- How would you design the agenda for a monthly business review with the CEO?
- Estimate how many field staff we would need to launch in a new city with 500 orders a day.
- Which metric would you remove from most dashboards, and why?
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What does a business operations manager do?
A business operations manager runs the planning and review rhythm of a company. They define core metrics, prepare business review packs, investigate problems that cross departments, model capacity and headcount, and lead projects such as city launches or pricing changes. The role connects sales, operations, finance and product around shared numbers.
Is business operations the same as operations management?
No. Operations management runs the daily delivery of a product or service, with teams, shifts and output targets. Business operations sits alongside leadership and works on planning, metrics and cross-team problems. A business operations manager rarely manages frontline staff, while an operations manager usually does.
What background do business operations managers usually have?
Many come from management consulting, analytics or operations roles, and often hold an MBA. What matters most is comfort with data, especially SQL and spreadsheet modelling, the ability to structure a messy problem, and experience getting several departments to agree on one plan.