About
I’ve built things from zero more times than I can reasonably defend.
The Thread
At Riskalyze, I built support from a single shared inbox when the company had fewer than ten people. Then CS. Then an education program. At RightCapital I built the CS department from zero, including the first formal feedback loop the company had ever run. At GitLab I built CS Operations infrastructure for a 250-person org that had outgrown its processes, then the renewal operations function, then Gainsight as the system of record for 250 CSMs across a globally distributed team.
The pattern isn’t coincidence. I am drawn to the moment before the system exists — when the work is still defined by who shows up and what they remember, before anyone has named the problem clearly enough to fix it. That’s when diagnosis matters most, and it’s where I do my best work.
The methodology I use doesn’t change much by domain. Map what’s actually happening before touching anything. Name the real constraint, not the surface complaint. Build something documented and measurable enough that the team can run it without me. At GitLab that looked like a weighted health scoring model embedded as the company’s single source of truth. At Mercy Ships it looked like Value Stream Mapping applied to treasury workflows and cash approvals on a hospital ship in West Africa. The constraints are always different. The thinking is the same.
How I Work
These aren’t aspiration statements. They’re patterns I’ve noticed in the work I do well, and problems I’ve created when I’ve ignored them.
Diagnose before prescribing. Most operations problems aren’t operations problems. They’re strategy problems wearing an ops costume. Before building anything, I map what’s actually happening: where the work waits, where accountability blurs, what the data says versus what the team believes. Get the diagnosis wrong and every well-executed process leads somewhere it shouldn’t.
Build to outlast yourself. A system that requires its builder to explain it every quarter isn’t a system — it’s a dependency. Everything I build is documented, measurable, and handed off to the team with a clear explanation of why it works. The goal is for my departure to be operationally uneventful.
Automate what you can. Be human where it counts. AI changes what’s possible in GTM operations, but it doesn’t change what matters. The question isn’t which tasks AI can handle — it’s where human judgment, accountability, and relationship still determine the outcome. I’m rigorous about that line.
Make the invisible visible. Most retention problems in month 10 were decisions made in month 2. Most headcount problems in Q3 were planning assumptions made in Q1. Operations work is largely about surfacing what’s actually happening — in the data, in the workflow, in the handoff — before it becomes a crisis someone has to manage.
Career Arc
I spent five years at Riskalyze building teams, then a year at RightCapital doing it again at a company with entirely different constraints. GitLab was four years of larger-scale infrastructure work: a 10-person CS Ops team, a 130%+ NRR business, and a 250-person CS org that needed operational rigor to match its ambition. Along the way I presented the PROVE health scoring framework at Gainsight Pulse 2023 to a sold-out room, published in the GitLab handbook, and served as the named DRI for a cross-functional initiative spanning Data, R&D, CS, Sales, and Field Ops.
In late 2023 I left full-time GTM work to join Mercy Ships as Finance Director aboard the M/V Global Mercy in West Africa. That’s a deliberate detour I’m glad I took — and one I’ll explain below, because it’s worth explaining.
The Mercy Ships Chapter
In July 2024, my wife Jaclyn and I moved with our children to Freetown, Sierra Leone to serve on the M/V Global Mercy, a hospital ship operated by Mercy Ships. I took a two-year assignment as Finance Director, leading a five-person team covering payables, receivables, the crew bank, and cross-functional collaboration with ship leadership and department heads. We’re finishing that assignment in summer 2026.
Mercy Ships · M/V Global Mercy · West Africa · 2024–2026
Finance Director
This was not a gap year. The operating environment was genuinely hard: limited connectivity, a crew from 40+ countries, financial workflows held together by institutional memory and goodwill. The team was skilled and committed. The systems were not.
I started in finance. Crew stipend processing was running 8–12 hours per cycle; we redesigned it to 2–4 hours. Monthly insurance invoicing consumed five full working days; we automated it to one. Cash approvals lived in email threads; we moved them into a tracked system. An AI-enabled economic impact study compressed what would have been weeks of manual analysis into hours — the first study of its kind for the ship.
Once we had the main finance workflows stable, we had room to look beyond the department. The hospital is the tip of the spear at Mercy Ships — it’s where the mission actually happens, surgical programs, patient outcomes, field service operations — and it had the same structural problems finance had started with: processes held together by people instead of systems.
The ship’s leadership asked if we could help. The same methodology applied directly. Thirty hours of manual data entry per field service, eliminated. Transport coordination cut from a month to a week. Bed forecasting moved from a daily spreadsheet marathon to a live 30-day view.
I worked myself out of jobs, repeatedly, and that felt right. In a volunteer organization, the desire is to build something resilient enough that when someone steps away — and they always do — operations don’t crumble. Mercy Ships runs on people who give their time and then go home. A truly successful system is one that doesn’t require any particular person to hold it together. A hiring manager reading the GTM work and the Mercy Ships work should reach the same conclusion about how I operate.
Outside the Work
I’m relocating back to California in summer 2026 with Jaclyn and our kids. We’ve lived outside the US for two years; we’re ready to come home.
I read widely across operations, strategy, and organizational design. Richard Rumelt on strategy. Taiichi Ohno on lean systems. Lincoln Murphy on customer success. When something shifts how I think about the work, I usually end up writing about it. The blog is that record — not polished thinking, but thinking in progress.
I’m a CPA. I do not lead with the credential because I’ve found it is less useful of a signal than the work itself.
I’m looking for a full-time leadership role in GTM Operations, RevOps, or CS Ops at a company ready to build something real with AI. I’m available starting summer 2026.
Jeff Beaumont 