A working proposal · Chief of Staff, R&D
“…transforming social media from an isolated marketing channel into an enterprise-wide system of intelligence and action.”
Srinivas Somayajula · July 2026That is Trellis: fragmented social data in, organization-wide decisions out.
The Chief of Staff role runs the same system one layer down. Fragmented program data in, executive decisions out. I built that layer at Airtable a few times over and the video below is one I created as a prototype for Sprout Social.
2 min 33 sec 15 decisions entered 8 resolved without a principal 1 routed live on camera
Example of how I'd think about prioritization with the context I found online.
The first month is trust, not systems. Two principals who each need to know I represent them accurately before I touch their cadence. The diagnosis runs alongside: by the end of the month you get a one-page read on where the operating rhythm leaks your time, and I have run this exact turbulence before, including a CTO transition.
The unified cadence and OKR ledger are running at full strength. The Decision Queue from the video is live: every escalation routed, CPO-owned, CTO-owned or handled without you, and by then I know the org well enough that many never reach you (and you easily see what did not and why).
Recovered time is a number or it is nothing. The QBR, all hands and board memos assemble themselves from the ledger and the skills built on it, so my hours go where the posting points them: cross-cutting initiatives and the trade-offs that need your judgment surfaced early enough to act on.
The operating system is itself AI-native with agents in the workflow and MCP in daily use, the same architecture Sprout ships to customers. Product Central at Airtable is the working precedent, 100+ projects running on it today.
Chief of Staff and Head of Product Operations at Airtable, supporting the VPs of Product, Engineering and Design across a 200+ person org. I built its operating cadence from the ground up, own leadership communications from all hands to board memos, run OKR planning across 14 teams, and lead the product operations team behind it all. I came to the title through practice: seven years running the programs senior leadership needed to get right, long before the role was named.