Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Stop Trying to Know Every Detail (The COO's Real Job) | Guillaume Bouvard

10 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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Guillaume Bouvard explains what a COO actually does: maintain an organization-wide view and be the source of truth for critical information. You can't know every detail, but you should anticipate common questions, especially about financials. Deep familiarity with numbers develops through repeated conversations over time, not instant mastery.

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When you are a COO, you need to have a view that is very comprehensive of what's happening. And the expectation is almost that you're the single source of truth on a lot of information. It's a little bit of a hard one, yeah, because you can't know everything. It's not possible. But what you can do is to be prepared with the typical question or at least double down on the areas that you know there will be questions about. Financials is always an easy one. But again, same thing with financial. I cannot know all the details, not just not feasible. And it comes with time, by the way, because you, I think you learn a lot by having these conversations again and again. Get to know your numbers. I think that's a, you know, that's a very easy one.