Behind the Scenes: The diverse responsibilities of a Chief of Staff ft. Kanika Khurana of Chargebee

In startups around the world, particularly in SaaS, the role of a Chief of Staff is becoming very important. But there’s very little most people know about this role. If you’re at a company with a Chief of Staff, you’ve probably seen them as part of different projects, in different meetings, or having conversations with managers across the company. 

But, what exactly do they do? What is their everyday role like? When does a company need to hire a CXO? On this episode of SaaS Sessions, we sat down with Kanika Khurana, Chief of Staff at Chargebee to talk about all this and much more. 

Kanika tells us that the role itself is very dynamic and varies from company to company, depending on their requirements. While in some companies it is operations-heavy, in some others it has more to do with strategy.

At Chargebee, Kanika’s role is strategy-oriented. She helps drive all strategic priorities for the CXO while keeping an eye on what are all the plans they want to achieve over the next six months or a year. To enable this, she gets to be involved in multiple projects, have conversations with folks across different functions, and give her ideas for how a project can best align itself with the company’s goals. She calls this a ‘Helicopter View’, where you know what’s happening everywhere, but don’t have to land right into it. 

Kanika’s experience as a generalist, moving across different roles and functions over the last ten years has helped her in her role as Chief of Staff, she says. Not only did this help her learn about different functions, but it also helped her to understand how the efforts of different teams can be coordinated in the best way possible. She also adds that the skill of being fungible across different functions and roles is key to being a good Chief of Staff.

As to when a company should hire a Chief of Staff? Kanika says that there is no standard timeline for this, nor is it based on the series of funding. It is dependent primarily on the stage of growth a company is in. She says that when a company has established itself directionally and is in a growth or hyper-growth phase, that’s when a Chief of Staff can help bring some order to the chaos. At the end of the day, the role is about knowing where the company wants to go directionally and clearing its obstacles to get there. 

To know more about how a Chief of Staff helps a company on its growth journey, listen to the full episode here.