RevOps Is Quietly Becoming an Engineering Job

Over the past two weeks, the reporter has been discussing various aspects of RevOps, from a calendar table with 25 hours in November to a customer health score that barely passes a coin flip. They started their career in supply chain and later moved into revenue operations, where they taught themselves SQL. Initially, RevOps focused on owning the CRM, building reports, running forecasts, and ensuring sales and finance used the same numbers.

However, the evolution of data storage has shifted, with numbers now residing in warehouses such as Snowflake or BigQuery. This change has necessitated the use of SQL skills for reconciling data. The cost of writing code has decreased due to AI coding agents, leading to more automation in RevOps. The real shift, however, is the increasing need for operations engineering, where scripts run at specific times, need to survive system updates, and alert operators when they fail.

This operational aspect of RevOps is becoming more critical as the scripts relate directly to revenue and are not owned by other departments. The reporter outlines several key areas to invest in for RevOps professionals, emphasizing the importance of SQL knowledge, mastering scheduling systems, implementing version control, testing numbers alongside code, establishing staging and promotion processes, and documenting metric definitions.

They caution against turning RevOps into a shadow data engineering team, suggesting that data engineering should handle the platform, while RevOps focuses on business logic and revenue-related tasks. The ideal RevOps professional will be proficient in both operations and engineering, treating scheduled jobs as products with users.

The job description has not caught up with these changes, but the skills required for success in RevOps are increasingly engineering-focused.