The board had tried everything. Two COO hires in eighteen months — both experienced operators, both gone within the year. Executive coaching for the founder. A strategy offsite that produced a 40-page plan nobody executed. Quarterly targets missed for five consecutive quarters. The board was running out of explanations and running out of patience.
The prevailing theory was a people problem. The founder couldn’t delegate. The team lacked urgency. The culture was broken. Every explanation pointed at individuals. None of them explained why the pattern persisted after the individuals changed.
What the board saw
From the board’s vantage point, the signals were clear: a Series A clean energy company that should have been hitting milestones and wasn’t. The technology worked. The market existed. Early customers were engaged. But execution was consistently below plan, and the gap was widening.
Two COO departures looked like hiring mistakes. The friction between engineering and commercial teams looked like a culture problem. The missed targets looked like a leadership deficit. The board had seen these patterns before and applied the standard interventions — better hires, clearer targets, tighter oversight. None of it worked.
What the diagnosis revealed
The structural diagnosis found something the board interventions hadn’t been looking for: three teams operating under conflicting mandates.
The company was a hybrid — clean energy hardware with a software monitoring platform and a project delivery component. But it was organized as if it were a pure software company. Engineering was structured around product sprints. Commercial was structured around project timelines. Operations was structured around hardware deployment cycles. Three different operating rhythms, three different definitions of “done,” three different assumptions about what mattered.
The mandate conflicts were specific and observable. Engineering prioritized platform features that would scale the software business. Commercial committed to project deliverables that required custom engineering work. Operations needed hardware reliability improvements that neither engineering nor commercial had prioritized. Every team was executing against their mandate. Every mandate contradicted the others.
The COOs hadn’t failed because they were bad operators. They’d failed because the operating model didn’t match the business model. No amount of operational excellence can fix a structural contradiction. You can’t coordinate your way out of conflicting mandates — you have to resolve them.
The mechanism
The root cause was structural, not personal. The company had grown from a founding team of five — where everyone understood the full picture and coordination was implicit — to 40 people organized into teams that had been designed by accretion rather than intention. Nobody had sat down and designed an operating model for a hybrid hardware-software-services business. They’d just added teams as they needed them and assumed coordination would happen.
It didn’t. The coordination costs were invisible — buried in Slack threads, duplicated in meetings, absorbed by individuals who spent their days resolving conflicts that the organizational design created. The COO role was supposed to solve this, but no COO can overcome a structural design that generates the very friction they’re hired to eliminate. They became the coordination layer the organization was missing — and burned out under the load.
What changed
The intervention wasn’t a new hire or a new strategy. It was an operating model redesign.
The three conflicting mandates were resolved into a single integrated mandate with clear boundaries. The hardware, software, and services components were reorganized around customer outcomes rather than functional disciplines. Engineering capacity was explicitly allocated across product development, custom project work, and platform reliability — with the allocation visible and governed, not hidden in sprint planning.
The coordination layer that two COOs had tried to provide through personal effort was built into the organizational structure itself. Cross-functional decisions had a clear escalation path. Resource conflicts had a governance mechanism. The teams knew which mandate they were serving because there was one mandate, not three.
Within two quarters, the company was hitting milestones. Not because the team suddenly got better. The team had always been capable. The system they were operating in had been preventing them from producing the outcomes they were working toward. Once the structure changed, the same people produced different results.
If your portfolio company has been through coaching, reshuffles, and strategy offsite and the pattern persists — the problem is probably structural. Let’s find the mechanism.