This post is part of a multi-part series where we chat with members of Bitly’s leadership team.
If you were to quickly glance at the resume of Kevin Arts, VP of Business Operations and Analytics, you’d see that his path to Bitly was not a direct one.
Graduating into the recession, one of his first career moves after earning his undergraduate degree was working as a staff assistant at a policy think tank in Washington D.C. There, he got a front row seat to health policy during the passage of Obamacare. (See, we told you it wasn’t direct.)
“It was the most entry-level job you can imagine. I answered phones, stocked paper and printed things. But it was an incredibly exciting time to be in Washington, and an experience that helped shape what was to come of my career.”
After nearly two years in Washington, Kevin decided to return to school to get his master’s in public administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse. Having, in a sense, “reset” his career, he joined the strategy and operations practice at Deloitte upon graduating, working for a variety of different federal clients and leading a pricing analysis for $60 billion USD in acquisitions.
Following Deloitte, Kevin moved to San Francisco to join Google in its Google Cloud unit, working in sales ops and doing financial planning and analysis forecasting, pipeline analysis, and operations work, among other things.
That brings us to Bitly. Before his recent promotion to VP of Business Operations and Analytics, Kevin came on board as director of the department.
Ready to get to know him some more? Let’s get started.
Why did you choose to come to Bitly?
I wanted to be closer to the impact I was making. In my previous roles at Deloitte and Google, I felt like I was doing work that was meaningful. At the same time, at companies that big, you’re only ever a tiny part of a much larger system. Coming to Bitly afforded me the opportunity to work on similar problems but I get to see the impact of my work on a daily basis.
I also knew some of the folks that worked at Bitly and was very confident that it would have a great workplace culture. Plus, the opportunity ahead of Bitly is tremendous. Being able to be a part of that story was really attractive.
Were there any actions you wanted to take starting Day 1?
In order to bring the types of analysis and insights I wanted to bring to the organization, there was a lot of upfront work that needed to be done to free data from the silos of different SaaS products we use. Being able to bring that data together, correlate it and apply it in a meaningful way was one of the first things I prioritized.
What are your top 3 leadership principles?
– Don’t just know what needs to be done. Be able to do good work yourself.
– Trust that your folks are the amazing people you know they are and try not to step in more than necessary.
– If your team is smart, talented and they try really hard, then their personal success and growth
What’s the best career advice you’ve ever been given?
It’s actually something I read in a book called “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.” I read it when I was working at Deloitte, when I kept having this yearning to find my passion in life. The book’s premise is to not be obsessed with the concept of finding your passion but, rather, become really good at something and then leverage that into the type of work you find enjoyable.
That really shaped my perspective during an important time in my career. It helped me turn away from looking off into the distance at what else was out there and instead focus on what I enjoyed about my job and what I could get really good at. I stayed at Deloitte for another year or so, and I got to work on some amazing projects and really push myself in ways that allowed me a creative outlet.
Can you share a pivotal moment in your career when you could have taken one path but decided on another?
One moment that comes to mind was when I was at the Maxwell School deciding what to do after graduating. Grad school sort of resets everything for you. People are willing to hire you for many different types of roles rather than solely evaluate your fit based on your previous work.
I had a lot of different opportunities. If I hadn’t gone to Deloitte, I probably would have worked at a think tank and done research, or a federal agency. I chose Deloitte to get a breadth of experience and it ended up opening up a lot of doors for me. I got introduced to business and strategy work, which has been my career since.
How do you start your day?
Usually with half an hour of reading in bed. And by “reading” I mean looking on my phone at Twitter or articles I have queued up. I guess my personal and professional interests have converged over time, since the things I find interesting are the things that help me be better at my work. (But they can also be random cat memes.)
What’s your approach to solving big problems?
One is to understand the fundamental issue. Big problems are either made up of many contributing factors or the contributing factors are unclear, so it’s important to take a step back and understand the problem, how a good end state would look and what stands in the way of arriving at that state. If there are 10 things contributing to the problem but addressing three of them would solve 80 percent of it, then I’d start with those three things.
If you could pick a mentor, anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
Don Berwick is one of the people I most respect and admire in the world. He’s a healthcare professional I’ve been following for a long time who helped shape our nation’s health policy under Obamacare. I met him once at a roundtable in D.C. and I admire how his and his team’s work has literally saved millions of lives. He’s also done some pretty incredible graduation speeches that I watch when I need inspiration. If I could have 10 percent of his goodness, I’d be multiples better than I am today.
Where does the magic lie in BizOps and analytics?
In my line of work, you’re often faced with very open-ended challenges and tight timelines with only a couple of people to help tackle something that normally requires a larger team and a longer period of time. It’s really exciting when our team, collectively, figures out a way to get the job done in half the time—doing it in a way that still pushes the envelope and is a meaningful step forward for the organization. To me, that feels magical.
What about your new role are you most excited about?
I’m excited about bringing operations and analytics together and growing the team so we can make large leaps, rather than small steps, forward.
This or that
Coffee or tea? Coffee
Bike or drive? Drive
Invisibility or flight? Hmmm… Flight
Risk or reward? Risk!
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Thanks for reading this week’s Why I’m at Bitly post!
