New COO at a Tech Scale-Up: Set Priorities for Your First 30–90 Days

Start With a Mandate, Not a Transformation Plan

As a new COO at a tech scale-up, your first priority is not to fix everything. It is to agree on what you are there to own, understand what is limiting the business, and help the leadership team execute more reliably.

Use the first 30 days to diagnose and align, days 31–60 to test focused improvements, and days 61–90 to establish what works. Treat these as overlapping phases rather than rigid deadlines. A cash, security, or customer crisis may require immediate action.

Days 1–30: Align With the CEO and Understand Reality

The COO role varies significantly between companies. You might own internal operations, revenue execution, cross-functional delivery, or a combination. An impressive plan will not help if you and the CEO have different expectations.

In your first week, agree on a short written mandate:

• Outcomes: What should be meaningfully different in 90 days?
• Scope: Which functions and cross-functional decisions do you own?
• Authority: What can you decide independently, and what requires consultation or approval?
• Boundaries: What remains with the CEO and other executives?
• Working relationship: How will you handle disagreements and communicate decisions?

Ask the CEO where they want relief—and where they are genuinely ready to transfer authority. Responsibility without decision rights can turn the COO into a coordinator who still needs permission for everything.

Then listen across the business. Meet functional leaders and a representative group of employees close to customers, delivery, and support. Review relevant customer feedback or join customer conversations with the account owner.

Ask consistent questions: What are we trying to achieve? Where does work stall? Which commitments repeatedly slip? What should we protect as we grow?

Validate the answers against available evidence: cash forecasts, retention, sales commitments, delivery reliability, hiring plans, and product or service incidents. Check metric definitions before trusting dashboards. In a scale-up, different teams may use the same label for different measures.

By day 30: Share a concise diagnosis with the CEO and leadership team: strengths to preserve, the main constraints, urgent risks, and important unknowns. Invite correction before presenting your conclusions as settled fact.

Days 31–60: Choose the Few Changes That Matter

Do not turn every observation into a project. Prioritize work using four questions:

1. Does this protect the business from a significant near-term risk?
2. Does it advance an agreed company objective?
3. Does it remove a recurring constraint across teams?
4. Can we make progress with the capacity available?

Select two or three priorities with the CEO and relevant leaders. Make the trade-offs explicit, including what will wait or stop.

For example, if sales commitments repeatedly exceed delivery capacity, adding another status meeting will not address the underlying issue. A better intervention might be a clear approval path for nonstandard commitments, shared capacity visibility, and an owner for resolving exceptions.

For each priority, define:

• The problem and its business impact.
• One accountable owner and the people needed to contribute.
• A baseline and a measurable sign of improvement.
• The next milestone and review date.
• Constraints, dependencies, and escalation triggers.

Test the change in a manageable area before expanding it. Avoid reorganizing simply to demonstrate momentum; structural changes should follow evidence about the work and accountability gaps.

By day 60: Have focused improvements underway, with visible ownership and early evidence of whether they are helping.

Days 61–90: Build a Lightweight Operating Rhythm

Your goal is not to become the person who personally chases every commitment. It is to make priorities, decisions, and obstacles visible enough that leaders can act without constant intervention.

Establish or improve a small set of practices:

• Weekly execution review: Discuss exceptions, blocked decisions, and commitments—not lengthy status presentations.
• Shared priority view: Record owners, milestones, dependencies, and current risks in one place.
• Decision record: Capture consequential decisions, their rationale, and when to revisit them.
• Business review: Examine outcomes and resource trade-offs at a cadence appropriate to the business.

Use existing tools where possible. New software rarely resolves unclear authority or competing priorities on its own.

Review your partnership with the CEO, too. Are they continuing to route decisions through you—or bypassing the ownership you agreed on? Address mixed signals privately, then clarify the arrangement with the team.

By day 90: Present what changed, what the evidence shows, what remains unresolved, and your recommended priorities for the next quarter. Distinguish completed activities from improved business outcomes.

Measure Your Leadership, Not Just Your Activity

A useful early test is whether the organization is becoming clearer and less dependent on individual intervention. Do leaders know what matters? Are decisions happening at the right level? Are problems surfacing earlier?

Protect time to reflect on your own behavior. If every issue is becoming yours, reconsider whether you are building ownership or replacing the founder as the bottleneck.

Jessica Hill Holm’s Leadership Reset Workbook creates space to reflect on your leadership, priorities, and personal development while your company scales. For leaders who want personal support applying these ideas, a coaching call offers a place to explore the challenges ahead.