What is a Operations Manager at Workiva?

As an Operations Manager at Workiva, you are the critical engine that drives cross-functional alignment, process optimization, and execution at scale. Workiva’s platform simplifies complex reporting and compliance challenges for thousands of enterprises worldwide. To support this mission, the operations function ensures that internal teams—ranging from product and engineering to customer success and go-to-market—are operating efficiently and cohesively.

Your impact in this position extends directly to the business's bottom line and the overall customer experience. You will be tasked with identifying operational bottlenecks, designing scalable workflows, and implementing data-driven solutions that allow Workiva to deliver its SaaS products seamlessly. Because Workiva operates in a highly regulated, high-stakes domain (financial reporting, ESG, and audit compliance), the operational frameworks you build must be both resilient and adaptable.

Expect a role that is highly dynamic and deeply strategic. You will frequently navigate complex, ambiguous problem spaces where the path forward is not immediately clear. Success requires a blend of analytical rigor, exceptional stakeholder management, and a hands-on approach to problem-solving. You are not just maintaining the status quo; you are actively architecting the operational future of a leading cloud platform.

Common Interview Questions

While you cannot predict every question, Workiva’s interviews follow distinct thematic patterns. The questions below represent the types of behavioral and situational inquiries you will face. Focus on the underlying competencies being tested rather than memorizing responses.

Operational Strategy & Execution

These questions test your ability to design, implement, and measure the success of business processes.

• Walk me through your methodology for auditing an underperforming team's operational processes.
• Tell me about a time you automated a highly manual process. What tools did you use and what was the impact?
• How do you balance the need for rigorous process compliance with the need for team agility?
• Describe a time when you had to scale an operation rapidly to meet sudden business growth.
• What are the most critical KPIs you track to ensure operational health, and why?

Navigating Ambiguity & Problem Solving

These questions evaluate your resilience and ability to create structure in chaotic environments.

• Tell me about a time you were asked to execute a project where the core objectives were constantly changing.
• Describe a situation where you had to make a significant operational decision with less than 50% of the data you wanted.
• How do you approach a problem when you have no prior experience in that specific domain?
• Give an example of a time you failed to anticipate an operational roadblock. How did you recover?
• Walk me through a time you had to push back on leadership because their strategic vision was operationally unfeasible.

Stakeholder Management & Leadership

These questions probe your emotional intelligence and ability to influence cross-functional peers.

• Tell me about a time you had to convince a skeptical engineering team to adopt a new operational workflow.
• Describe a conflict you had with a peer in another department. How did you resolve it while maintaining the relationship?
• How do you ensure accountability when you are managing a project but have no direct authority over the contributors?
• Give an example of how you tailor your communication style when presenting to executives versus individual contributors.
• Tell me about a time you had to deliver bad news about a project timeline to a key stakeholder.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for the Operations Manager interview requires a strategic mindset. Workiva evaluates candidates not just on their past achievements, but on how they approach unstructured problems and collaborate with diverse teams.

Navigating Ambiguity – Workiva operates in a fast-paced environment where requirements can shift. Interviewers will heavily evaluate your comfort level with ambiguity. You can demonstrate strength here by showing how you create structure out of chaos, prioritize competing demands, and drive consensus without having all the answers upfront.

Operational Excellence & Scaling – This criterion focuses on your ability to build and refine processes. Interviewers look for evidence that you can identify inefficiencies and implement scalable, metrics-driven solutions. You should be prepared to discuss specific frameworks or methodologies you have used to improve operational velocity.

Cross-Functional Leadership – Operations Managers rarely have direct authority over the teams they support. You will be evaluated on your ability to influence without authority, communicate clearly across different technical and business domains, and align disparate groups toward a common goal.

Data-Driven Problem Solving – Intuition is not enough; you must prove your ability to leverage data. Interviewers will assess how you gather metrics, analyze operational health, and use those insights to make objective, impactful decisions.

Interview Process Overview

The interview loop for an Operations Manager at Workiva is thorough and designed to test your resilience, consistency, and depth of experience. You will begin with a standard recruiter phone screen to align on your background, compensation expectations, and basic cultural fit. If successful, you will move to a hiring manager interview, which dives deeper into your operational philosophy, past projects, and specific domain expertise.

Following the hiring manager screen, you will enter the core evaluation phase, which typically consists of several long, in-depth interviews culminating in a panel presentation or discussion. Workiva utilizes a highly structured evaluation matrix during these final stages. You may notice that different interviewers ask you very similar behavioral and situational questions. This is an intentional strategy used by the panel to calibrate your responses, ensuring consistent competencies across different scenarios and team perspectives.

Throughout the process, the company places a premium on how you handle open-ended scenarios. You will be expected to demonstrate your ability to take a vague prompt, ask clarifying questions, and build a logical framework for a solution.

This visual timeline outlines the typical progression from initial screening through the final panel evaluations. Use this to pace your preparation, ensuring you reserve enough energy for the rigorous, multi-stage panel rounds where your consistency and depth will be heavily scrutinized. Expect the final stages to require significant stamina and a deep well of behavioral examples.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Process Optimization and Scaling

For an Operations Manager, the ability to build and refine processes is foundational. Workiva needs leaders who can look at a tangled workflow, identify the root causes of friction, and implement streamlined solutions that can grow with the company. Interviewers want to see that you do not just apply temporary fixes, but rather architect sustainable, long-term operational frameworks.

Be ready to go over:

• Root Cause Analysis – How you identify the actual source of an operational bottleneck rather than treating the symptoms.
• Metrics and KPIs – The specific operational metrics you track to measure efficiency, quality, and output.
• Change Management – How you roll out new processes to teams that may be resistant to change.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Lean Six Sigma principles, advanced capacity planning models, and automated workflow integration strategies.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through a time you identified a broken process and the steps you took to rebuild it from the ground up."
• "How do you measure the success of a newly implemented operational workflow?"
• "Describe a situation where a process you built failed to scale. What did you learn and how did you pivot?"

Navigating Ambiguity

Workiva’s environment frequently requires operating without a complete set of instructions. A core evaluation theme for this role is your tolerance for and mastery of ambiguity. Strong performance here means you do not freeze when faced with vague directives; instead, you proactively define the scope, gather necessary data, and forge a clear path forward for your team.

Be ready to go over:

• Framework Creation – How you establish guardrails and definitions when starting a project with unclear requirements.
• Risk Mitigation – Your strategy for identifying and managing risks when operating with incomplete information.
• Prioritization – How you decide what to tackle first when everything seems urgent and undefined.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you were handed a critical project with almost no direction. How did you proceed?"
• "How do you keep your team motivated and focused when the company's strategic priorities suddenly shift?"
• "Describe a scenario where you had to make a high-stakes operational decision with incomplete data."

Cross-Functional Influence and Communication

Operations Managers at Workiva sit at the intersection of multiple departments. You will be evaluated heavily on your stakeholder management skills. Strong candidates demonstrate high emotional intelligence, the ability to tailor their communication style to different audiences (e.g., engineers vs. sales executives), and a track record of driving alignment without formal authority.

Be ready to go over:

• Conflict Resolution – Your approach to managing disagreements between departments with competing priorities.
• Stakeholder Mapping – How you identify key decision-makers and build relationships to push initiatives forward.
• Executive Communication – Summarizing complex operational data into actionable insights for senior leadership.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Give me an example of a time you had to align two departments that had fundamentally different goals."
• "How do you handle a situation where a key stakeholder is actively blocking your operational initiative?"
• "Describe your process for keeping cross-functional teams informed and accountable during a long-term project."

Key Responsibilities

As an Operations Manager at Workiva, your day-to-day work revolves around ensuring that the business engine runs smoothly. You will be responsible for defining operational rhythms, establishing communication cadences, and ensuring that strategic goals are translated into executable daily tasks. This requires constant vigilance over the health of ongoing projects and the agility to intervene when metrics begin to slip.

Collaboration is a massive part of your daily routine. You will partner closely with product managers, engineering leads, and customer-facing teams to ensure that product rollouts, system migrations, and go-to-market strategies are supported by robust internal operations. You will act as the crucial translation layer, turning high-level business objectives into concrete operational requirements.

You will also drive key initiatives related to tooling and automation. This involves auditing the current tech stack used by internal teams, identifying gaps, and leading the procurement or development of solutions that reduce manual toil. Your ultimate deliverable is a more efficient, predictable, and scalable operational environment that empowers Workiva's teams to do their best work.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be competitive for the Operations Manager role at Workiva, you need a robust blend of strategic thinking and hands-on execution capabilities. The company looks for professionals who have proven experience managing complex operations in a fast-paced technology or SaaS environment.

• Must-have skills – Exceptional project and program management capabilities, strong data analysis skills (Excel, SQL, or BI tools), and a proven track record of cross-functional stakeholder management.
• Experience level – Typically requires 5 to 8+ years of experience in operations, program management, or management consulting, preferably within the B2B SaaS or technology sector.
• Soft skills – High tolerance for ambiguity, elite written and verbal communication, strong negotiation skills, and the ability to influence without direct authority.
• Nice-to-have skills – Familiarity with compliance or financial reporting software, certifications in Agile/Scrum or Lean Six Sigma, and experience with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How difficult is the interview process for an Operations Manager at Workiva? The process is rigorous and can feel exhausting due to the number of deep-dive behavioral rounds. Expect a medium-to-high difficulty level, primarily because interviewers will push you to provide highly specific details about your past experiences and how you handled ambiguity. Thorough preparation using the STAR method is essential.

Q: Why do different interviewers ask me the same questions? Workiva uses a structured panel approach to evaluate candidates. If you hear similar questions across different rounds, it is not a mistake. The panel is calibrating your responses to ensure consistency and to evaluate your core competencies from multiple departmental perspectives.

Q: What is the typical timeline from the initial screen to an offer? Timelines can sometimes stretch longer than expected, especially when coordinating panel interviews across multiple busy stakeholders. It is not uncommon for the process to take several weeks. If communication goes quiet for a few days after a final round, remain patient but feel free to follow up politely with your recruiter.

Q: What differentiates a successful candidate from an average one? A successful candidate doesn't just describe what they did; they clearly articulate the why and the impact. They show extreme comfort with ambiguity and demonstrate a clear framework for bringing order to chaotic situations, all while maintaining strong, collaborative relationships with their peers.

Other General Tips

• Embrace the Ambiguity: Do not get flustered if an interviewer gives you a vague scenario. They want to see you ask clarifying questions, define the boundaries of the problem, and confidently propose a structured approach.
• Master the STAR Method: Because the interviews are heavily behavioral, structure your answers using Situation, Task, Action, and Result. Spend the majority of your time on the Action (what you specifically did) and the Result (the quantifiable business impact).

• Quantify Your Impact: Operations is a numbers game. Whenever possible, use specific metrics to describe your achievements. Did you reduce processing time by 20%? Did you save the company 40 hours of manual labor per week? Use hard data to validate your success.
• Interview the Interviewer: Operations Managers need to deeply understand the business context. Ask insightful questions about Workiva’s current operational bottlenecks, cross-functional team dynamics, and strategic goals for the upcoming year.

Summary & Next Steps

Securing an Operations Manager role at Workiva is an opportunity to drive massive impact at a company that is redefining enterprise compliance and reporting. The role demands a unique hybrid of strategic vision, relentless execution, and the interpersonal finesse to align diverse teams. You will be challenged to bring clarity to complex problems and build scalable systems that support global growth.

Your preparation should focus heavily on mastering your behavioral narrative. Anticipate questions that test your ability to navigate ambiguity, influence stakeholders without authority, and optimize broken processes. By structuring your answers clearly and backing them up with quantifiable data, you will confidently demonstrate that you are the operational leader Workiva needs.

This compensation data provides a baseline expectation for the role, though actual offers will vary based on your specific experience level, geographic location, and performance during the interview loop. Use this information to anchor your salary expectations and ensure you are aligned with the recruiter early in the process.

You have the experience and the drive to succeed in this rigorous process. Continue to refine your examples, practice structuring your thoughts out loud, and leverage resources on Dataford to deepen your competitive edge. Approach your interviews with confidence, knowing that your operational expertise is exactly what Workiva is looking to add to their team.