Operations Manager

How to hire an Operations Manager for your SMB

Before you write the job posting, settle three questions. They determine which profile you actually need and avoid the most common scope mistakes at German SMBs. The Operations Manager is often the 2nd or 3rd leadership hire after the founders, and the hire shapes the company’s operations for the long term.

Question 1: Operations Manager, Office Manager or COO? The three roles partly overlap but are not equivalent. The Office Manager runs the office (premises, office suppliers, general administration, internal events, logistical onboarding). The Operations Manager runs the cross-functional operation of the company (processes, tools, strategic suppliers, structuring projects). The COO (Chief Operating Officer) defines the overall operational strategy and sits on the leadership team; they are justified from 150-200 employees. Blending the three in one ad attracts poorly matched applications and costs time. Specify the function in the title itself: Operations Manager (m/w/d), not a versatile Ops and administration profile, which says nothing.

Question 2: Which focus area? At an SMB the perimeter of an Operations Manager varies considerably depending on the most painful function at the time of hiring: RevOps (sales cadence, CRM reliability, forecast, Sales/Marketing/CS alignment), FinOps (financial reporting, budget tracking, SaaS stack optimization, procurement), PeopleOps (onboarding, HR tooling, feedback processes, steering team growth) or pure cross-functional with no clear dominant. List the dominant focus area and the expected perimeter explicitly in the ad. A RevOps profile does not have the same reflexes or master the same tools as a FinOps profile; recruiting without a definition attracts heterogeneous applications and produces interviews where everyone talks about a different post.

Question 3: Which team to lead? At a German SMB the Operations Manager can be a sole individual contributor or lead a small team (1-5 people: an Ops assistant, a dual-study student, an internal accountant, an Office Manager). The nature of the role changes with the configuration: alone, they spend 80 % of their time on execution and 20 % on cross-functional scoping; with a team, the ratio flips to 40 % execution and 60 % coordination. Specify the expected configuration in the ad and test the managerial dimension in the interview if it exists. An SMB under 60 employees rarely needs a constituted Ops team; a sole Operations Manager is enough.

If the three answers converge on a mid-level Operations Manager (5-10 years of experience) for an SMB with 30-200 employees and a defined focus area, see the ready-to-use template on the Job description tab.