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What are the fundamental differences between a revenue operations manager and a senior revenue operations manager?

Shirin Sharif
Shirin Sharif
Adobe Sr. Director, Revenue OperationsNovember 16

Titles mean different things at different companies, so I'll answer the question more along the skills you need to be promoted to more senior roles within revenue Ops. 

The big skill is the ability to think big and think ahead. It's very easy to spend your entire week or month fire fighting as a line manager. As you grow your role and scope, you need to allocate time to think about the future and innovate. How can the company accelerate growth? Reduce costs? How does the team further the goals of the business? How do we measure the strategic programs? How do you retain and develop talent? These are questions that great managers start thinking about and they are table stakes for "senior managers / directors."

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Mollie Bodensteiner
Mollie Bodensteiner
Sound Agriculture Revenue Operations LeaderDecember 15

I think the fundamental difference between a senior and a non-senior operations role centers around these core competencies:

  1. Proactivity and stakeholder management: A senior manager should be able to operate on projects autonomously with stakeholders and proactively drive output, where a manager generally needs some additional support in these functions. As well as close out a project with insights and data to drive action vs building reports (I would expect a senior to drive decisions with data and closed-loop analytics)

  2. Systems & technical acumen: A senior manager typically is completely ramped on the stack and can apply knowledge immediately whereas a manager might still be ramping on best practices, etc. (this is an experience lever)

  3. Typical ramp time: In hiring a difference in my mind between a senior and a manager is the time for the ramp - the amount of industry knowledge, product knowledge, general business acumen, and experience in executing the goals we are focused on achieving. I would expect a senior to be fully ramped in 3 months whereas a manager is probably closer to 6 months

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