There's a pattern that plays out consistently in scaling companies. Someone is hired to do a specific job — build a process, manage a project, coordinate across teams. A year later, they're in every important meeting, they know more about the business than almost anyone, and executives are calling them before making major decisions.

They didn't ask for this. It just happened. It's what happens when operators do their job well enough for long enough.

The information accumulation effect

Cross-functional coordination forces you to be the hub of a lot of information flows. BizOps sits in meetings across the company, tracks deliverables across teams, sees the roadmap, the sales pipeline, the customer feedback, the hiring plan. They're the function that has to know what's happening everywhere because their job is to catch misalignments before they become problems.

This creates a genuinely unique information position. Functional leaders know their domain deeply. Executives know the high-level view. Operators know the connective tissue — where teams are out of alignment, where dependencies are at risk, where the data tells a different story than the narrative.

Over time, this makes them disproportionately useful to decision-makers.

The judgment accumulation effect

Information is one thing. But operators also accumulate judgment — the ability to recognize when something is wrong, when a plan is unrealistic, when a team is overcommitting.

This judgment comes from pattern matching across many similar situations. The BizOps person who's seen three product launches go sideways because engineering and marketing weren't aligned has a different calibration than anyone on either team. They can see the pattern early. They know which signals to watch for.

This is why the best operators become trusted advisors — not because they have authority, but because their pattern recognition is unusually good. They've seen more of the machine than anyone else.

Dan Yoo and the LinkedIn model

Dan Yoo, who helped build LinkedIn's BizOps function from 2009–2014, described it as "a decision-support mechanism that helps with everything from optimizing day-to-day options to carrying out high-priority initiatives to tackling the most important strategic questions." That's a precise description of what happens when operators accumulate enough information and judgment to be genuinely useful to senior decision-makers.

LinkedIn's BizOps didn't just run processes. They were in the room when the hardest decisions were being made — because by that point, they had the broadest view of the company and the trust of the people making the calls.

Why this is both good and dangerous

The decision-support evolution is good because it makes companies work better. When an operator can flag a strategic assumption that's wrong before a decision is made, that's genuinely valuable. When a BizOps person can tell a CEO that the sales pipeline numbers don't match what the field is actually seeing, that's worth a lot.

It's dangerous because it can create dependency without accountability. The operator becomes indispensable to decision-makers but has no formal authority. They absorb the context, make the recommendation, and then watch the decision go the other way. This is the quiet frustration of the decision-support role: you're asked to think deeply about things but the decisions aren't yours to make.

The organizational implication

The best companies recognize this dynamic and build around it rather than against it. They give their operators enough authority — or at least enough access — to actually influence the decisions they've been trusted to inform.

The worst companies treat operators as extremely useful but ultimately disposable: gather the information, make the recommendation, then go back to your lane. That's a reliable way to lose good operators and leave the decision-support capacity unused.

What separates good ops teams from great ones isn't just execution capability. It's whether they've built the organizational trust to be in the room when decisions get made — and whether those decisions actually reflect what the people closest to the work can see.

Sources: Dan Yoo / LinkedIn, Tonkean, Costanoa Ventures