Problem
MagmaLabs (~70 people, 24–26 clients, ~55 operatives) had negative client NPS, an eNPS of 10, and utilization around 80% — a workforce and client base both signaling active dissatisfaction, with no systemic plan to fix either.
Action
Applied a Care → Trust → Teamwork → Delivery sequence as the organizing principle for how the company operated — deliberately treating the human conditions (care, trust) as the mechanism for the business outcome, not a soft add-on to it.
The sequence didn’t start with the title. Much of it was already running before the COO role formally existed; becoming COO made it the operating model rather than something I was doing anyway.
Result
NPS moved from negative to 99. eNPS moved from 10 to 95. Real utilization moved from 80% to 98–99% — the remaining gap was sickness and vacation, not idle capacity. All within six months.
Those three numbers only mean anything together. 99% utilization on its own is what a squeezed workforce looks like. An eNPS of 95 on its own is what a pleasant company that doesn’t ship looks like. Both at once is the entire claim: people were working at full capacity because they wanted to, not because they were being held to it.
Left the COO role afterward when leadership asked to deprioritize people in favor of treating them as cost lines — a deliberate return to engineering, not a demotion.