Programs and operations · Executive leadership and startup operations
Building operations at Sentinel Insights
Joined as the first employee and served as an executive vice president, helping build the operational foundation of a B2B SaaS company across product operations, customer success, marketing, and internal operations.
- Organization
- Sentinel Insights
- Role
- Founding team member and executive vice president
- Years
- 2021 to 2026
First employee, five years on the founding team, and a strategic advisor to three CEOs.
Overview
Sentinel Insights developed a monitoring platform to help organizations identify issues in their marketing technology environments, including data collection, consent management, and third-party technology performance.
I joined as the first employee in July 2021 and spent five years on the founding team, working across product operations, customer success, marketing, and internal business operations.
Challenge
Building an early-stage SaaS company requires continuous decisions about how to allocate limited resources. Product development, customer requirements, commercial priorities, and internal operational needs all compete for attention, and the people making those calls are usually the same people doing the work.
My role
As an executive vice president, I served as a strategic advisor to company leadership, including three CEOs over my five years, and helped establish the functions and operating practices needed to support the business. My responsibilities included customer-facing operations, product coordination, marketing, sales enablement, and internal organizational processes.
Approach
I focused on connecting business priorities with day-to-day execution. That included translating customer feedback into actionable product discussions, developing sales and marketing resources, coordinating work across engineering, product, sales, and customer-facing teams, and creating repeatable processes as the organization evolved.
Some of that work was hands-on and specific. I built pitch decks and market-sizing models, wrote sales enablement materials, and developed an AI-powered thought leadership engine that turned the team’s expertise into a steady stream of published content.
Outcome
Over five years, I helped Sentinel move from its earliest stage to an established enterprise-focused SaaS business. The experience strengthened my ability to build functions from the ground up, lead across organizational boundaries, and balance strategic planning with hands-on execution.