The Chief of Staff role: Renee Zhang @ Mutinex

“At the end of the day, my job is all about making sure everyone in the company knows what they need to do and why it matters. This helps us all work together better and move in the same direction.”

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, Renee Zhang will share the frameworks and processes that are used to build high performing teams at Mutinex.

About Mutinex

Mutinex is a software company building the first generalized model that enables enterprises to allocate capital efficiently for growth. By processing vast amounts of unstructured data, Mutinex’s platform GrowthOS provides actionable intelligence into how enterprises expand and contract today’s market.

Company size: 71
Website: https://mutinex.co  

Summary

About the role

• The Chief of Staff at Mutinex acts as a strategic partner to leadership, ensuring alignment across the organisation during a phase of rapid growth.
• Weekly tasks involve supporting the leadership team, overseeing projects that don’t fit neatly into any one function, and facilitating communication and alignment across teams.
• The role is also involved in external management of investor relations, overseeing communications and preparing board meetings.

Lessons learned

• Perfection is a moving target: Achieving flawless processes takes time, patience, and continuous adjustments, especially in a fast-growing organisation.
• The truth can be elusive: Being removed from day-to-day operations means relying on intuition and making decisions with incomplete information.
• Adaptation is key: Processes and frameworks evolve, and success requires ongoing refinement rather than expecting immediate perfection.

The interview

Q: How would you describe your role?

When I first joined Mutinex, the question came up so frequently that I wrote a blog post titled "WTF is a Chief of Staff?". At its core, being a Chief of Staff is about being a strategic partner to leadership and a force for alignment across the organisation. It is, of course, an inherently dynamic and multifaceted role that varies across companies.

My interest in this role began during my time at Eucalyptus, where I saw firsthand how a Chief of Staff could serve as a key right-hand to the GM, involved in everything from operations to growth, product, and customer experience. That versatility and influence over critical business areas really drew me into the role itself.

At Mutinex, we are in a phase of rapid scaling, both in size and across geographies. My role was created to bring structure to our growth, ensuring that our executive leadership team stays aligned, focused, and consistently moving in the same direction, and that this flows on to the rest of the team. As Chief of Staff, my aim is to be the glue that holds these moving pieces together, helping us stay nimble while scaling effectively.

To succeed as a Chief of Staff, I believe you need a comprehensive understanding of the business—from the broad strategy to the day-to-day details. For instance, while I’m not directly responsible for sales, I keep a close eye on our pipeline to ensure we're tracking toward our quarterly goals. If we’re off pace, it's my responsibility to bring this to the attention of the relevant team and work with them to course-correct.

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

One of the harder questions to answer! My typical week is packed and varied, with the focus on ensuring things run smoothly across the organisation. Internally, I handle leadership ops, plan for the next 3-6 months, and run special projects (e.g. pricing strategy, international expansion) that don’t neatly fit into any one function. I’m there to support the leadership team with strategic priorities, company operations, and reporting, and am often an escalation point for the team. Externally, I manage our investor relations, oversee communications and prepare our monthly board meetings.

A large part of my job involves keeping us aligned with our top-line goals. This means regularly checking in with team leaders, helping different functions collaborate, and helping unblock teams. I also work closely with our CEO, helping to prioritise tasks and act as a sounding board for ideas.

I facilitate clear communication across the organisation (or I’m trying to at least). This involves crafting company-wide updates, leading leadership meetings, and ensuring everyone understands our goals and the reasons behind them.

Additionally, I dedicate time each week to reviewing key metrics to get a clear sense of how the business is performing and diagnosing areas that require attention. These discussion items are then brought into our weekly ELT meetings.

At the end of the day, my job is all about making sure everyone in the company knows what they need to do and why it matters. This helps us all work together better and move in the same direction.

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

I’ve seen how planning and KPIs are managed across different organisations, from larger companies like Atlassian to smaller startups. My approach is to keep things streamlined—too much time spent planning can hinder actual execution. I find focusing on key metrics and continuous iteration is often more valuable than over-planning every detail.

At Mutinex, we like to keep planning light. For me, the foundation is top-level alignment and cascades down to individual teams, with a strong emphasis on execution. Our high-level metrics rarely change; there’s usually a revenue metric, a product metric, and a customer metric that serve as our north stars. However, the focus areas and tactics can shift quarter to quarter based on what’s most critical at the time. Once these overarching goals are clear, each team can create their own roadmap that directly supports them.

Ultimately, execution is what matters most. I believe setting ambitious goals is important, but ensuring your team is equipped and empowered to achieve them is where success happens. I focus just as much, if not more, on ensuring we hit our targets as I do on setting them. If targets aren’t met, we revisit what went wrong, whether it was a flaw in the planning process, a misalignment of resources, or an execution issue, and adjust accordingly. This reflection helps us improve continuously rather than just moving on to the next cycle.

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

We set our goals at the beginning of the year and revisit them each quarter. Our main business metrics—revenue, product, and customer—stay consistent to guide our focus throughout the year.

To ensure the business is performing in the direction it needs, we hold weekly Executive Leadership Team (ELT) meetings where we monitor key metrics: revenue, sales pipeline, product performance, and customer health. This helps us keep a close eye on what's driving the business and which areas may need some swarming.

Our weekly town halls keep everyone in the loop, focusing on growth, product, and customer updates. This keeps a transparent and consistent pulse of the company and ensures alignment across teams.

To track our progress, we use a mix of tools—Tability for leadership reporting, Notion for day-to-day documentation, Jira for operations, and Linear for engineering. These help us spot trends and provide the right context for decision-making, with Tability's mix of data and commentary being particularly helpful.

Regular 1:1s between managers and their teams are another key part of our rituals; these more intimate sessions are often spent focussing on the individual’s contribution to their team’s roadmap. We find keeping this pulse helps everyone understand how their work contributes to our broader goals and keeps the team engaged with what's most important.

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

I’ll do you one better and give you two.

1. Perfection is a moving target: It’s easy coming into a company with fresh ideas for how to improve existing processes or establish new frameworks. For instance, I initially thought that by setting everything up perfectly from the start—complete with templates and clear instructions—we could achieve a flawless planning process. In reality, it became clear that a faultless process happens over time and requires ongoing adjustments. It takes patience and repetition to align everyone and ensure that processes are consistently followed and documented, particularly in a rapidly growing organisation. I do, however, believe faultlessness can be achieved.
2. The truth is often elusive: Being one step removed from a team's day-to-day operations means I'm always distanced from the team's immediate realities. I spend considerable time piecing together different perspectives, which can sometimes involve navigating finger-pointing. I've learned that, due to my role's nature, uncovering the objective truth may remain an ongoing challenge. I've come to rely more on my intuition, understanding that I'll often make decisions with incomplete information.

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

As with any role, on top of understanding why you want to hire for the position, the most crucial part is thinking about how you’re going to set the person up for success. In my experience, this is my advice for an organisation that is about to introduce a Chief of Staff:

1. Thoughtfully assess the need: Before hiring, carefully consider if a Chief of Staff is the right fit for your organisation. While there's no universal "right time" to create this position, hiring managers should still evaluate whether a dedicated specialist in areas such as finance, operations, or P&C might be more appropriate for your current needs.
2. Clarify the role’s purpose: If you decide to proceed, clearly articulate why you're hiring a Chief of Staff. Are they filling a gap in expertise? Will they represent a particular function? While the role may evolve naturally (it almost always does), establishing a clear initial framework will benefit both the individual and the principal.
3. Embed them early: Integrate your Chief of Staff into the company and its functions as soon as they start. This helps them understand the organisation deeply and build crucial relationships from the outset. The role will grow with the company, and so will the person, so it’s important they are embedded as early as possible.
4. Proactively address the skepticism: Recognize that some team members may initially be uncertain about this new role, so it’s vital for leadership and the principal to clearly establish the Chief of Staff’s influence and importance early on.

And finally, a hiring tip: prioritise candidates with exceptional communication skills, both written and verbal. It should be their superpower! In my experience, these skills aren't intentionally tested enough during the interview process, yet they are probably one of the highest signals of success in this role.

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