The Chief of Staff role: Erin Clazie @ Sitemate

"Don’t be afraid to scrap the old way of doing things entirely"

The Chief of Staff (CoS) role is rapidly gaining momentum in startups. But what is it exactly? And what does it take to be successful? Rather than coming up with our own definition we decided to hear directly from people that are in this role.

This interview is part of a series focused on the role of Chief of Staff. In this post, Erin Clazie will share the frameworks and processes that are used to build high performing teams at Sitemate.

About Sitemate

Sitemate builds best-in-class no code software platforms which thousands of built world companies use every day.

Company size: 120

Website: https://sitemate.com

Summary

About the role

• The Chief of Staff role at Sitemate starts with addressing critical bottlenecks and evolves into broader strategic responsibilities, including supporting the CEO and overseeing revenue teams.
• Weekly duties involve a mix of executive support, coordination with various teams, and managing diverse projects, with a focus on adapting to the company’s rapid growth.
• Quarterly planning is data-driven, relying on retrospectives and key metrics to set priorities, ensuring alignment across all teams and regions.
• Success as a CoS requires focusing on the most significant bottlenecks, being willing to rebuild systems as the company scales, and using structured processes to maintain efficiency and avoid multitasking.

Lessons learned

• Adaptability: be willing to rebuild systems from scratch as the company grows to ensure they remain effective.
• Focus on bottlenecks: prioritise addressing the biggest bottleneck first to create early impact and build momentum.
• Systematised efficiency: use structured processes and frameworks to work efficiently and avoid unnecessary multitasking.

The interview

Q: How would you describe your role?

It’s a great question, as the Chief of Staff (CoS) role is somewhat ambiguous, and can have a wide range of meanings and various scopes across different orgs. At Sitemate, it’s common for the CoS to pivot roles in a short window, after being brought on to address a very specific and critical bottleneck. This was the case for our first Chief of Staff, who was brought in to address bottlenecks with our Operations team, who fast-followed with a move to VP of Operations just 8 months later.

For myself, I was brought into the role following our Pre-Series A fundraise, to act as an extension arm for the CEO on projects required to support our growing teams. Post fundraise, our growing teams across Oceania, Europe, and North America were scaling quickly, all breaking various regional records, with critical infrastructure required to support this growth. The role is about 80% GTM strategy and infrastructure, and 20% everything else - Operations, Revenue, Product, and general strategy. I got into the role through broad GTM experience across the funnel, with experience as an SDR, AE, AM, and CSM, as well as people leadership, putting me in a good spot to work on various projects across the GTM funnel. 

In a similar fashion to our first CoS, this role organically evolved into more ownership over our revenue teams and a transition to the VP of Revenue role. To sum it up, the CoS at Sitemate plays a critical role in unblocking the CEO, so they can continue adding fuel to the fire across the business to stay on our growth trajectory.

Q: What does a typical week look like for you?

A typical week can vary depending on what projects are on the go at any given moment, which is what keeps things exciting - no two weeks look the same. Recurring tasks would involve general executive support, gathering feedback from our GTM teams for process improvements, coordinating with our Revenue teams across GTM Operations, GTM Engineering, and Revenue Operations to drive execution on projects, and working with our General Managers across Oceania, Europe, and North America on our forecasting, target setting, and hiring roadmaps. 

However in between those recurring tasks, there are projects with vastly different scopes - including overhauling our product knowledge base and introducing an AI assistant to improve customer support, updating the collateral for our Sales and Customer success teams to align with our new frameworks, and changing the structure of our Product and Engineering teams to support the next phase of growth from 100+ employees to 500 as we layer on more products like Flowsite to the Sitemate stack.

Q: Do you have a process in place to plan quarters and align the org?

Planning a quarter always starts with a thorough retrospective on how the previous quarter landed, which we achieve through our quarterly kickoff sessions across the regional GTM teams. We run sessions with each regional team (GTM leadership, SDRs, AEs, AMs, and CSMs) as well as the Director layer in these functions in a separate session following. End of quarters are busy, as it’s my job to prep the data for these sessions, coordinating with our Revops and Finance teams.

Key metrics we’re looking at include:

• SDR conversion (demos completed)
• New business ARR attainment
• Expansion ARR attainment
• NRR cohorts
• Churn rates/reasons from the previous quarter

These metrics are segmented by SMB, Middle Market, and Enterprise to drill down further into how each sub-team is performing and get as granular as possible to identify what is/isn’t working in each region’s funnel. The most valuable insights for planning the quarter surface in these sessions from the frontlines - infrastructure improvements are never a top-down approach. What comes out of these sessions largely informs the quick wins I’ll execute on at the beginning of the quarter, as well as the larger strategic projects for the remainder of the quarter.

Following our value of High Vis, all the learnings from these sessions and strategic priorities resulting are then shared in public channels with the team(s), so everyone is aligned.

Q: What processes and frameworks does your company rely on to help teams perform at their best during the quarter?

One thing you can say about Sitemate is everything is processed out and systematised, whether through small scale/daily processes, or how projects are managed throughout the quarter. It’s all codified in our set of values:

• Everything Engineered
• Quality Certified
• Fast Tracked
• High Vis

We believe that basic human values such as honesty, trust and integrity are required to simply ‘get in the door’, whereas Sitemate’s values are highly specific to how work should be executed. For example High Vis - this means on a daily basis, our teams are completing an automated standup via Slack every morning, briefly recapping how yesterday went, what they have planned today, and to surface any challenges. This is just one example of many, but a small yet potent action of visibility that allows us to spot issues and blockers for employees in real-time, and fast track any improvements same-day. I’d say the same principle applies across larger initiatives - it’s all about real-time, qualitative support on the inputs, which ultimately drive the outputs.

This philosophy applied at scale avoids a situation many teams find themselves in where they are retroactively looking at the quantitative data at the end of quarter, and trying to back track and figure out what went wrong.

Q: What’s a lesson that you had to learn the hard way as the company grew?

If it’s not perfect, build it again and build it right - don’t be afraid to scrap the old way of doing things entirely, and invest the extra time to map out an ideal state and build it again from scratch. The systems and infrastructure required at 50 employees looks very different from the journey from 100+ employees to 1000, and even with the best intentions and first principles thinking applied on a project or initiative, the org outgrows the old way of doing things, and I had to learn quickly not to get too attached to ideas I’ve invested time in.

When jumping into projects, it’s been extremely helpful to shift my mindset from “well how does the process/system currently look? Let’s follow that logic” to “taking the current process/system off the table, what should it look like?”. When growing and scaling at the rate we are, the lesson I’ve learned is to be default skeptical about every current process and system's state. 

Q: What’s your advice for an org that is about to introduce the Chief of Staff role?

The key to success in a CoS role is understanding how the whole company’s system works, across all of the various teams, which is obviously a challenge as you’ll need to get up to speed on a lot to hit the ground running.

My advice initially is to clearly define what the #1 company bottleneck is, ie. the biggest opportunity to accelerate momentum across the board, and have that be your CoS’s primary focus for the initial period. Having a big impact in an area where everyone has been feeling the bottleneck, from the outset of starting the role, really gets the momentum going.

From there, layering on small warm up tasks across a wide range of teams is a great way to get exposure across the entire system and you can add complexity from there. Another key piece to the success in my role is having the executives clearly define focus projects, creating an environment where the CoS is not multitasking too much, and supporting engineered processes, systems, and tooling that protect the Chief of Staff’s time.

The work and execution is more efficient this way, to avoid too much context switching, and I can effect change much quicker than trying to do everything at once, and always being in reactive mode.

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