Brought in as Chief of Staff to absorb the operating load, build the systems that didn't exist on day one, and get the launch back on track.
A Fortune 500 is opening a new to augment its global technology talent base. The center is in the acceleration phase — physical build-out, talent ramp-up, and global integration all running in parallel. The Site Leader is being pulled into global steering committees while the local execution machine is still being assembled.
The Chief of Staff role exists to absorb the operating load, build the systems that didn't exist on day one, and let the Site Leader focus where only they can.
Physical build-out is behind schedule due to repeated vendor slips. Updates to global teams are inconsistent. There is no unified program view.
100 key roles across Product, Engineering, and Data — to be hired in 4 months. HR is stretched, hiring managers are not aligned on priorities, and interview SLAs are breaking.
Global Product, Engineering, and HR have different priorities and communication patterns. Decisions move slowly. Dependencies are unclear. Global partners want structured governance.
Global steering committees, executive expectations, and local execution all want the Site Leader's calendar. Without a Chief of Staff, every decision routes through one person.
The ask in one line: stabilize execution, accelerate hiring, fix governance, and improve global visibility — in 90 days, with a Site Leader whose calendar is already full.
Each layer has its own scope, attendees, and decisions it owns. Pick a decision below to see who's Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.
Cadences are how the governance model becomes a calendar. Without these, every decision routes through the Site Leader. With them, most decisions don't need to.
The Site Leader chairs three cadences. The Chief of Staff chairs the rest. That ratio is the design.
India EBR answers "are we on track this week?" · Global Steering answers "can the global org plan around us?" · Monthly Value answers "is the bet paying off?"
Stabilization plans are easy to over-engineer. Four trade-offs shaped what stayed in and what got cut.
The temptation is to start everything in parallel because everything is broken. But the workforce plan and the hiring engine are upstream of every other constraint — interview SLAs can't be fixed before role architecture is approved, vendors can't be selected before the workforce plan exists. So Talent gets Week 1. Centre Launch's diagnostic runs alongside, but the build can stabilize without governance in place — governance just makes it slower to fix when it breaks. Reporting (the cadences and dashboards) waits until Week 3, because reports without underlying systems just amplify the chaos.
The point of the operating system isn't to add more meetings — it's to remove decisions from the Site Leader's queue. Daily stand-ups, weekly talent reviews, bi-weekly operational reviews: these are Chief of Staff cadences. The Site Leader shows up only for India EBR, Global Steering, and Monthly Value, where their authority is irreplaceable. If the ratio drifts the other way, the operating system is failing.
The instinct in a stabilization plan is to build a dashboard for everything — workforce, vendor, milestone, capital. That's a four-week project that delivers nothing useful in week one. Instead, the first 30 days use spreadsheets and the existing global tooling, instrumented just enough to populate the three reports above. The proper exec dashboards get built in Month 2, once we know what the numbers actually need to be — not before.
Everything above gets the GCC to predictable execution by Day 90. But the assumption that the same operating system carries the GCC from 100 hires to 500 hires is wrong — different scale, different governance. With more time, I'd add a second 90-day arc: Days 91–180 to harden the playbook, codify the org design, and step the Chief of Staff out of the daily cadences. Stabilization is a phase, not a steady state.