You just inherited RevOps. Start with a charter.
Being told to "own revenue operations" is not a mandate. Until authority is written down, every decision you make is reversible by whoever objects loudest.
Someone has asked you to own revenue operations. There is no document describing what that means, no list of decisions you are allowed to make, and no statement of what you are not responsible for. There is a backlog of requests from four teams, and an expectation that the numbers will start agreeing with each other.
The instinct is to start fixing things, clean the pipeline, rebuild a report, fix the lead routing. That instinct is what turns the function into a ticket queue, permanently.
Why fixing first fails
Every fix you make crosses a boundary someone else believes they own. You change a stage definition; sales leadership changes it back. You standardise a lifecycle field; a marketing automation rule overwrites it that night. You publish a metric definition; finance publishes a different one in the board deck.
None of that is obstruction. Each team is defending a definition it depends on, and nobody has said whose definition wins. Without that, you are not governing the system. You are one more voice arguing about it, with a worse title than the people you are arguing with.
What a charter actually contains
A RevOps charter is short, a page, and it answers four questions in writing, ratified by the executives whose teams it constrains.
- Scope. Which objects, definitions and processes revenue operations governs. Not "improves" — governs. Lifecycle states, stage criteria, the revenue data model, metric definitions, the system of record for each field.
- Authority. How a decision is finalised when two functions disagree. This is the clause that matters. If it does not say who decides, you do not have a charter; you have a description.
- Accountability. What revenue operations is answerable for. Usually: that the definitions are coherent, that changes are reviewed, and that reported numbers reconcile. Note that none of those are "hit the number."
- Exclusions. What revenue operations explicitly does not own. Quota setting, territory assignment, campaign strategy, deal approval, whatever the real boundary is. The exclusions are what make the scope credible.
Getting it ratified
Write the draft yourself. Do not run a workshop to produce it, a committee will produce something with no authority clause, because the authority clause is the part everyone would rather leave ambiguous.
Then take it to each function leader individually, before any group meeting. Ask one question: is anything in the exclusions list wrong, and is anything in the scope list something you believe you own? Fix what is genuinely contested. Hold the line on the authority clause, because a charter without it is worse than none, it creates the appearance of governance while leaving every decision reversible.
What it buys you
The charter does not make you popular and it does not fix a single number. What it does is convert every future disagreement from a negotiation into a lookup. When someone changes a stage definition without review, you are not asking a favour by changing it back, you are enforcing something they signed.
That is the whole difference between revenue operations as a governing function and revenue operations as a service desk. The work is the same work. The charter decides whether it holds.
Terms used in this note
Write the stop rule before the pilot starts
A market-entry pilot with no decision rule written before exposure cannot end. It gets extended until it is the default motion, without anyone choosing that.
Your pricing is a list, not a logic
A price list says what things cost today. It cannot say what to charge the deal in front of you, which is why realised price drifts and nobody owns the drift.
Four clocks: bookings, billings, revenue, and cash
Commercial commitment, invoicing, recognition, and collection answer different questions. Reconcile the clocks without treating them as one metric.