A founder I work with said something on a call last week that stuck in my craw. His team has decent product coverage, decent engineering coverage, decent ticket coverage, decent communication. "But the shortfall on all of this ends up being coordination."
Then: "Sometimes I feel like I do nothing. My role should not be needed."
His role is very much needed. He's the person who notices a feature is about to launch before anyone has told the customer, and goes and says so. What's changing is that more of his week is going into product work on a billing system, the kind of thing a CPO would own, and he can see the point coming where he won't have the hours to keep doing both. So he asked the question most founders run into at this stage: who takes that over, and what does it do to "authority and lines of communication"?
It feels like the industry right now doesn't have a clean answer. Chief of Staff sort of fits. Fractional COO sort of fits. It depends on the company and who you ask, because everybody has a different idea of what those titles mean.
I've never worked at a startup that had a COO, and my main reference for the job is Tim Cook (yeah, not a startup). Every time I try to describe my own work with one of these titles, I run into the same problem. Say "Chief of Staff" and many will picture Leo McGarry running the West Wing. But some are picturing what is essentially a glorified EA.
So instead of guessing, I went on a little agentic research project into the job postings.
The Whole Machine, One Head
Early on, the founder holds the whole machine in their head. The strategy, the customers, what engineering is building, what sales promised, and which of those are about to collide this week. Every small call routes through them because they're the only one with all the pieces. At ten people that's fine, because that is the job.
Then the company grows. The calls keep coming at the same rate while the founder's hours go to fundraising, the board, hiring, or in this founder's case, deep product work. The deeper he goes into it, the less of him is left for the coordination. The calls still need making. They just start waiting.
That's the Founder Bottleneck, and underneath it is the Operator Vacuum: the gap between the vision and what ships that nobody owns end to end once the founder can't.
The person who fills it sits in what I call the Operator Seat, and the best description I have of where it sits came out of that same call. I'm not fully in strategy, I'm mostly consuming the strategy. I'm not fully in execution either, because I can't be as far down in the weeds as the engineers are. It's a little Goldilocks zone. He finished the thought better than I did: you understand the strategy and what it means for day-to-day decisions, and you coordinate the people further down in the weeds, so you can tap someone on the shoulder before they walk into a rock.
So which title gets you that person?
Help Wanted: Leo McGarry, Authority Not Included
I'm in the middle of a bigger research project on who actually owns what ships at small companies, and job postings are the first piece of it. On Sunday I checked the job boards of all 1,492 Y Combinator companies with 10 to 100 people, then searched the same job boards for more small product companies. I kept every posting for a COO, Chief of Staff, CTO or CPO (or the Head of Operations, Engineering or Product when that was clearly the top role), and read each one for a single question, with AI agents doing the reading against a fixed rubric: does this role get the final call on what ships when product, engineering and the business want different things?
The COO in these postings runs the back office. If you were picturing Tim Cook, this isn't him.
The CTO runs engineering, and that's about where it ends.
The CPO is the only title that regularly gets real authority over what gets built, and that authority stops at the edge of product. The founder I opened with is sitting in exactly that spot right now. He's doing the CPO job well, and that's precisely why nobody is doing the coordination.
The Chief of Staff gets the seams: the cross-functional problems, the ones "without a clear owner." That's the Operator Vacuum, written into the job description by the companies that have it. And the authority is borrowed. The postings say drive, align, support - but none of them hand over the authority to make the final calls.
Not one of these postings gives a single role both the final call on what ships and the work between teams.
Companies are writing Leo McGarry job descriptions. The part they leave out is what made Leo work: everyone in the building knew he spoke on behalf of the President.
Mom and Dad Have to Agree
In my experience, a Chief of Staff role running on borrowed authority is a really hard job. To use a slightly juvenile analogy, Mom and Dad need to be aligned so the kids can't play them off each other. Anyone unhappy with a call the operator makes can always go to the founder. In a good setup, they get the same answer. The first time they get a different one, everybody learns where the real decision lives, and the person in the operator seat is essentially disenfranchised, relegated to carrying messages.
That's why the title alone doesn't fix anything. It has to come with two things the founder hands over on purpose: the authority to make a defined set of calls, and the knowledge needed to make them well. If either one stays in the founder's head, the person in the seat is guessing, and the calls drift back up.
It also cuts the other way. You may already have someone on your team who's been doing this job without the title. They just need to be blessed with it. Make it official, and give them the ownership and the authority to go with it.
But Isn't That the CTO's Job?
This is the objection I hear most, including from a podcast host who put it to me last week. My answer is yes, in part. At a startup, though, the CTO is usually operating as a tech lead. They're so absorbed in the tactical side that the broader picture, the customer, the board, how today's work feeds into the strategy, isn't front of mind. They probably have some inkling of it. It's just not where their attention lives.
I got a reminder of how real that is this month. I do solo builds of my own stuff all the time and keep all of it in my head with no problem. Doing a build for someone else, while also keeping enough presence of mind to come up for air and look at what's coming down the pipe? Pretty hard. Actually.
AI is widening the gap. One team I work with has an engineer who ships more code than the rest of the team combined, and they now push two releases a day. The founder's read on what that changed: "now our bottlenecks exist in product specification, and QA/UAT." When building gets cheap, the scarce work becomes deciding what to build and checking it came out right, and that's Goldilocks zone work.
Three Calls to Check Before You Hire
The question I'd ask before picking any of these titles:
Write down the three calls from last week that waited on you the longest. For each one, ask: which title I'm about to hire would have been allowed to make this call without me, and would the rest of the team have accepted the answer if they had?
If the honest answer is "none of them," the title doesn't matter yet. You haven't decided what you're handing over.
I'll share the rest of the study as it comes together. In the meantime I'm curious. If you've hired a COO or a Chief of Staff, which calls did you actually hand over, and which ones still come back to you?