PLAATO is moving from early deployments to scaled rollouts across complex industrial environments. Our biggest risk is no longer product vision it’s execution.

As COO, you will own the end-to-end operating system that turns customer demand into fast, reliable deployments and scalable account growth. Your job is to make PLAATO install faster, expand deeper inside customer accounts, and operate with enough structure that the CEO can step out of day-to-day execution.

This is not a “strategy COO” role. It is a build-and-run role. You will personally get involved in customer onboarding, expansion motions, and operational problem-solving in year one, while designing the systems and team(s) that make this repeatable at scale.

Your mandate is concrete:

• Reduce onboarding and first-value timelines from months to weeks
• Turn single-site deployments into multi-site rollouts
• Build an operating cadence that lets a lean team deliver enterprise-grade outcomes without bureaucracy

You will work closely with the CEO, Customer Success, Product, Software, and Sales - but you will own execution across onboarding, customer experience, expansion, and the internal systems that support them.

What you will be doing

1. Customer onboarding, deployment, and expansion (core ownership)

You own the customer lifecycle from signed deal to scaled rollout.

• Take direct ownership of onboarding and deployment execution, including early hands-on involvement at customer sites when needed.
• Build a repeatable onboarding model that enables PLAATO’s industrial gateways to be installed into complex control panels (networking, security, PLC integration, data validation) in under 3-4 weeks.
• Design and own the expansion motion: from initial deployment to multi-site rollout, renewals, and upsell.
• Define what “ready for scale” means technically and operationally before customers expand to additional lines, sites, or regions.
• Ensure customer commitments are realistic, explicit, and consistently delivered across Sales, Product, and Engineering.
  

Success looks like:

• Onboarding time reduced from several months to under 4 weeks
• Customers expanding beyond initial deployments by default, not exception
• Net Revenue Retention trending toward 140%

2. Company operating rhythm and execution

You are the owner of how work moves through the company.

• Design and run the company operating cadence: OKRs, quarterly priorities, weekly execution rhythms, and leadership alignment.
• Translate strategy into a small number of clear initiatives with owners, milestones, and success metrics.
• Surface tradeoffs early and force clear decisions when priorities collide.
• Create clarity on “what matters now”, and protect teams from thrash.
  

A key outcome of this work is that:

• Empower the CEO to focus on long-term strategy, fundraising, and market positioning
• Leadership meetings focus on decisions and outcomes, not status updates

3. Scaling the commercial and delivery engine

In partnership with Commercial leadership, you will professionalize how PLAATO grows accounts.

• Establish clear standards for pipeline hygiene, forecasting discipline, and deal handover from sales to onboarding.
• Define guardrails for pricing and packaging execution (in collaboration with the CEO and Head of Product).
• Ensure delivery capacity, onboarding promises, and expansion plans are aligned before deals close.
• Build feedback loops so learnings from deployment and customer usage directly inform commercial and product decisions.

4. Operational excellence, systems, and data

Own internal systems and tooling (CRM, customer delivery tooling, reporting, project execution). The CTO owns technical product systems; you own everything else.

• Identify bottlenecks, manual workflows, and points of failure - especially where poor data quality undermines the value of our chosen systems (e.g. CRM).
• Design simple, documented processes suitable for scale across customers, industries, and geographies.
• Build dashboards and KPI frameworks that give real visibility into:
  
  • Time to first value
  • Customer health and expansion readiness
  • Retention, NRR, and operational capacity

5. People and leadership

You will build the operational organization over time.

• Initially act as a player-coach, personally running onboarding and expansion while laying the groundwork for scale.
• Hire and develop operational leaders and functions as needed (Customer Operations, RevOps, Finance Ops, Partner Ops).
• Set a high bar for ownership, documentation, and follow-through.
• Build a culture of calm, accountable execution in an otherwise high-ambiguity environment.

What will help you thrive

• 8–15+ years of experience building and scaling operations in B2B technology, industrial tech, hardware, SaaS, or similarly complex environments.
• Proven ability to take messy, high-stakes execution problems and turn them into repeatable systems.
• Comfort operating at the intersection of hardware, software, data, and customer reality. Even if you are not deeply technical yourself.
• Strong operational judgment: you know when to enforce standards and when pragmatism wins.
• High ownership and bias toward action - you step into the problem until it’s solved.
• Experience scaling international customers, complex deployments, or multi-site rollouts is a strong plus.
• Curiosity about manufacturing environments and respect for the realities of running production-critical systems.

Practicalities

• Location: Oslo (in-office)
• Travel: Frequent customer travel is expected

Why this role matters

PLAATO’s technology only delivers value if the data is right, the deployment works, and customers can scale with confidence. This role exists because execution quality is now the limiting factor.

As COO, you will build the operating foundation that allows PLAATO to grow without slowing down. Not by adding layers, but by designing a system where a lean team can reliably deliver world-class outcomes for complex industrial customers.