Why RevOps Exists: The Hidden Signal Most Leadership Teams Overlook
By Christopher Cureton
RevOps is one of the smartest functions modern growth teams have built.
It exists because complexity makes alignment fragile. But its very existence points to something deeper: strategy that doesn’t travel cleanly across the organization.
If marketing, sales, and product need a dedicated team just to stay pointed in the same direction, you have a strategy translation problem. And translation is where momentum quietly dies.
Revenue Operations emerged when execution got messy.
Things got more complex for businesses, and suddenly forecasts didn’t line up. Pipeline quality varied wildly. Handoffs became sloppy, and therefore launches flopped. Sales blamed marketing. Marketing blamed product, and organizations did the rational thing. They created a team to:
standardize processes
align metrics
reconcile systems
coordinate launches
glue together marketing, sales, and customer success
In other words: keep the machine moving.
RevOps is coordination work. It is valuable, but coordination is not the same thing as clarity.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth. More coordination management is necessary when interpretation keeps diverging.
When every function shares the same understanding of:
who the customer is
what value actually means
what matters most right now
what “good” looks like
…work tends to line up naturally. Naturally, meaning fewer meetings, fewer escalations, and fewer reconciliations.
Decisions compound instead of collide.
When those definitions are even slightly different, each team optimizes locally. And local optimization is how the messiness described earlier begins.
When you have the mess, RevOps then becomes the referee, the translator, and the air-traffic controller.
It becomes necessary, but always working against divergence that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
The real problem so hard to diagnose, because most revenue problems show up downstream.
The alarms go off when forecasts are missed, launches underperform, and sales cycles become too long. It’s when the team can no longer miss that messaging is inconsistent and customers are confused that we stand at attention. And in that scenario, the problems look like execution issues.
So leaders try to fix execution. They build better dashboards, update processes, and schedule more check-in meetings.
But the root cause usually sits upstream.
The real problem is strategy that sounds clear at the top, but leaves too much room for interpretation as it moves through the organization.
At the leadership level, everyone agrees, but by the time it reaches product, marketing, and sales, each group is operating from a slightly different version of “what matters.”
It’s not because they’re careless. It’s because the strategy wasn’t designed to survive translation.
RevOps doesn’t create that gap.
It manages it.
There is a key difference between coordination and clarity.
This is the distinction most teams miss. Coordination is effort. Clarity is leverage.
Coordination says:
“Let’s meet to get aligned.”
Clarity says:
“We’re already aligned because the system makes the right choice obvious.”
One requires more energy over time.
The other reduces it.
RevOps is a coordination layer.
What most organizations actually need is a clarity layer.
The strongest organizations I’ve seen design operating logic that scales, instead of relying on constant synchronization.
They have shared definitions across the organization, clear priorities, simple decision rules, and a single interpretation of value across product, marketing, and sales.
When those foundations are explicit, something interesting happens.
RevOps gets easier. There are fewer fires to manage, and it’s not because the team is working harder. It’s because there is a Strategic Operating System that creates less friction.
Organizations must ask themselves a different question.
Instead of asking:
“How do we improve RevOps?”
A more useful question is:
“Why do we need this much coordination in the first place?”
If every quarter requires heroic effort just to keep teams aligned, qw we should realize that’s not an operational gap. It’s a system design gap. And design gaps compound.
Quietly.
Every day.
And more painfully.
To be clear: RevOps is not the problem.
It’s a smart response to complexity. But it’s also a signal. A signal that strategy may not be explicit enough to run without constant translation and re-communication from leadership.
It’s a signal that value definitions differ across functions.
It’s a signal that the organization is paying what I call the Misalignment Tax™ — small inefficiencies that add up to real revenue loss.
Most companies try to optimize the coordination layer. Very few step back and redesign the system that makes coordination necessary.
That’s the leverage point.
When strategy is clear enough to survive interpretation, alignment stops being a project. It becomes default behavior.
You can have less meetings, smoother handoffs, and better launches.
You can have revenue that doesn’t depend on individual heroics.
You can have a system that compounds efforts.
RevOps still exists in that system.
It just stops carrying the weight of the organization on its back.
If your teams are working hard but momentum still feels fragile, more often, it’s that the strategy wasn’t designed to scale.
And no amount of coordination can fully compensate for that.
Fix the system first.
Everything downstream gets easier.
Chris Cureton is the creator of the Strategic Operating System category and the United State of Brand Design™ framework. His work focuses on solving strategy translation failure in complex organizations by engineering strategic alignment as infrastructure—eliminating the Misalignment Tax™ and enabling coordinated execution across product, marketing, and sales.