Hire operators with agency. The rest is staffing.

An ops leader told me recently that her team "just needs clearer requests from marketing." That's the tell. That single sentence is the difference between a team that's going to be quietly outflanked over the next two years and a team that's going to be running the place. Great ops teams don't need clearer requests. They shape the request before it gets written.

Too many ops teams see themselves as ticket takers and order takers. They are not, and the leaders who let them act like it are the ones building the ceiling. The best ops teams in the world know exactly how much strategic and revenue impact they can have, and they act like it whether they've been given explicit permission or not.

If I were writing the job description honestly, it wouldn't open with tools or certifications. It would open with three traits: agency, empathy, and the instinct to push the envelope on what can be built and on who they can build tight relationships with. Everything else — the Salesforce experience, the SQL, the Marketo battle scars — is staffing. Those are filters. Agency is the job.

I've watched this shift happen in real time on teams I've led. There's a specific moment when an operator goes from "tell me what you need" to "here's what I think we should be doing instead, and here's why." It's never quiet. It usually involves them disagreeing with a senior stakeholder in a way that, six months earlier, they wouldn't have. And the work the team does after that moment looks nothing like the work it did before.

Here's the reframe: most practitioners underestimate how high the ceiling on their role actually is, and most leaders underestimate how much of that ceiling they set themselves by refusing to delegate strategic surface area along with the execution. The tools are fine. The data is fine. The thing in short supply is operators who walk into a room and assume the work is theirs to shape, not theirs to receive — and leaders who reward them for it instead of routing around them.

The fair counterargument is "but someone has to take the tickets." Sure. Tickets are real. But a team optimized for ticket throughput is never going to become the team that designs the system that removes the tickets. Those are two different teams, hired against two different bars, measured on two different things. Pick which one you're building, and then actually build it. The trap is pretending you can have both from the same people on the same comp band with the same incentives.

This is also, not coincidentally, the same thesis I keep landing on about AI: the modern revenue engine is a band, AI is increasingly playing the instruments, and someone has to conduct. Conductors are people with agency. Ticket takers are not going to become conductors by accident.

If you're hiring, hire for that. If you're leading a team, give them the air cover to act on it — and then stay out of the way the first three times they use it imperfectly. And if you're an operator reading this and you're frustrated, the ceiling you keep bumping into is almost always lower than the one your job actually has. The hard part isn't getting permission. The hard part is acting like you already have it.