Rev Ops PLG & Project Management

You are not hiring Rev Ops for tools.

You are hiring them to run the hardest projects in the company.

That is especially true if you care about two very different growth engines:

. PLG motions that turn users into revenue

. Outbound engines that keep pipeline full and clients happy

Both of those live or die on project management sitting inside Rev Ops.

How I got forced into real project management

This did not start in a Rev Ops seat. It started when I was COO at MFG . com.

We were a 15 year old marketplace that had burned through Angel to Series F and was drifting toward a fire sale. Not glamorous. Not “hypergrowth.”

The CEO and I had lunch together a lot. One day, between bites, he told me our product manager had put in notice after four or five years.

We could not afford to replace him.

Given where the company was, it was not exactly a magnet for top tier product talent anyway.

So he smiled and told me I would be taking over the product roadmap.

They did spring for Pragmatic Marketing Foundations and Build, which are not cheap. Overnight I became the product owner. That meant I had to:

. Sit with customers who were blunt about what was broken

. Pull input out of internal stakeholders who did not agree on priorities

. Work with the CTO and dev team on what was realistic

. Survive grooming sessions where engineers told me when a story was vague or useless

For the first six months, it felt like getting punched in the face on a schedule. I had come up through sales and operations, not product. This was foreign.

Then it clicked.

We started doing cleaner customer interviews. Combined that with usage data. Out of that came Shop IQ, an analytics tool that is still embedded in that product today.

That project rewired how I work. It taught me how to:

. Turn chaos into a prioritized roadmap

. Make hard tradeoffs in public

. Ship value in sequences instead of big bang launches

. Keep multiple teams moving toward a shared outcome without hiding behind title

Later, when I moved deeper into Rev Ops, that was the muscle I leaned on.

PLG: where Rev Ops project management actually shows up

On the site you will see a simple line:

“Turning PLG chaos into predictable growth.”

That is not a tagline. It is a description of project work.

In a PLG world, Rev Ops is not “the dashboard person.” They are quietly running projects like:

. Defining activation and healthy usage in a way that Product, Sales, and CS can all live with

. Instrumenting events and properties correctly in Segment, Amplitude, HubSpot, Salesforce and your warehouse

. Sequencing fixes to tracking, scoring, and lifecycle so you do not melt the team trying to do it all in one sprint

. Making sure every experiment has a clear owner, a timeline, and a way to tell if it worked

When that is missing, PLG turns into noise. Signups go up. Everyone argues about what is qualified. Nobody trusts the numbers.

When project management is there, PLG becomes something you can talk about in terms of pipeline, payback, and NRR instead of vibes.

Outbound agencies: orchestration and proof, not chaos

On the outbound side, I work with agencies and internal teams that are great at generating meetings. Where things fall apart is everything around that motion.

My short pitch for agencies is simple

“I help outbound agencies keep clients longer by building attribution that proves every dollar of pipeline they create”

That is not possible without project management in Rev Ops. The work looks like:

. Validating the ICP and target lists against actual conversion and churn data

. Orchestrating data between enrichment tools, CRMs, sequences, and calendars so no lead gets lost

. Building attribution that ties outbound efforts to pipeline, revenue, and retention

. Closing the loop quickly when quality drops, so the agency does not get blamed for structural problems in the stack

If nobody owns that project, outbound becomes a finger pointing exercise.

The agency blames targeting.

Sales blames lead quality.

Leadership blames “ops.”

With Rev Ops running the project, you get a clean story about what is working, what is not, and what to adjust first.

Why founders should care about Rev Ops as project managers

On paper, Rev Ops owns Salesforce, HubSpot, Segment, enrichment, attribution, and reporting.

In reality, for PLG companies and outbound agencies, Rev Ops should be the person who:

. Drives a single GTM roadmap that cuts across PLG, outbound, CS, and finance impact

. Forces explicit tradeoffs, instead of “we will do it all” planning that burns teams out

. Stages implementation work so systems keep getting better without constant fire drills

. Translates between founder goals, operating metrics, and what the team can actually ship this quarter

That is project management.

You want someone who has lived through owning a roadmap when money was tight and stakes were real.

The MFG . com chapter gave me that.

It made product ownership and project management the base layer for how I run Rev Ops today.

If you are a PLG founder who feels like growth is noisy and hard to pin down

“I help PLG companies diagnose why they are missing revenue targets and build the ops infrastructure that fixes it so growth becomes visible and predictable”

If you run or rely on an outbound agency and churned clients are killing you

“I help outbound agencies keep clients longer by building attribution that proves every dollar of pipeline they create”

Underneath both of those offerings is the same skill set.

Rev Ops as project manager.

Someone who owns the roadmap, not only the tools.