More Than Manufacturing: What Being a Battery COO Really Means 

When people hear "COO at a battery manufacturer," they assume I spend my days on the factory floor watching production lines. Don't get me wrong—manufacturing is a huge part of what I do.

But the reality? It's way more complex than that.

Manufacturing Excellence as Foundation

Yes, we at Proterra manufacture batteries, but modern battery production requires precision engineering at every step. By combining automation, advanced manufacturing techniques, and rigorous quality control, we produce solutions designed for the most demanding environments.

This manufacturing excellence is just the starting point.

Mission and Organizational Alignment

We have a mission at Proterra to power our customers' zero-emission initiatives by providing innovative battery solutions for the most demanding applications. Central to my role is ensuring that every team member knows how what they do each day is contributing to delivering on that mission. This sounds simple, but it takes a lot of calories and discipline to do it correctly. It begins with steering our leaders in developing our transformation strategy—developing our long-term goals, our multiyear targets, and the execution plans that will take us from a manufacturing technology start-up to a respected automotive grade manufacturing organization.

People are the center of all operations, and ensuring they know they are part of the future, they know the journey that we are on, and how they contribute to getting us to the destination is central to my leadership role.

Building Our Operating Culture

One of the most rewarding aspects of my role is developing and evolving our operating culture. While established manufacturers have had decades to develop their production systems, we can thoughtfully build from the ground up something that fits our specific mission.

I'm hugely focused on developing, articulating, and enabling our Production System which underpins our operating culture. People development, accountability, and respect form the foundation on which we build problem solvers, armed with a focus on 5S, standardized work, Kaizen, and a thirst to make each day better than the day before.

Culture building is hard and takes discipline to always "walk the walk." Nothing makes me prouder than seeing the teams and functions responding to the change and the metric needles moving. My calling here is to build a culture that outlasts any individual or leader. We are Proterra, we are automotive, and better never stops.

People Development: More Than Just Hiring

Operations leadership is all about people. We have a mission, we have a strategy to deliver it, but without the right people and talent we will not complete the journey. We develop problem solvers—accountable, caring team members who value Proterra's mission and want to be part of building our future.

With the support of leadership and HR teams we actively manage our talent bench and pipeline, providing the right training and the right opportunities to allow team members to grow in line with their ambitions and aligned with the needs of the organization. This is a critical part of my role—building the right talent and future leaders—seeing team members excel in their journey, whether at Proterra or elsewhere, is what gives me the greatest sense of accomplishment and is the "why" behind my leadership motivation.

Finding the Right Fit in Manufacturing

Battery manufacturing involves high-skill tasks in a safety-critical environment with high voltage and heavy equipment. Our training teams and production supervisors ensure everyone is properly prepared before they reach the production line.

Given these demands, we put candidates through hands-on assessments to evaluate their precision work capabilities and let them experience what the job actually involves. Someone might interview perfectly but find the manual aspects challenging. This approach ensures the right fit for everyone.

Quality Mindset and Customer Centricity

When manufacturing at scale, it takes everyone working together to build a quality, reliable product. Quality isn't something you inspect for at the end—it's built into every single step of what we do. We hold dear what are called the "three nevers":

1. Never accept a defect
2. Never produce a defect
3. Never pass a defect

When everyone understands who their customers are and sticks to these principles, quality gets embedded throughout the whole process instead of just being checked at the end. The concept applies outside of manufacturing also; I apply it across my whole organization. When you understand how your activity interacts with your upstream and downstream stakeholders, and you focus on applying these three simple statements, you build an organization that cares about the quality of their work and puts the customer at the center.

Manufacturing Strategy: Staying Ahead of Customer and Market Demand

My manufacturing strategy team envisions and shapes the future of our manufacturing capabilities. They combine new product launch plans with future customer demand to build our manufacturing investment roadmap. By analyzing demand forecasts with organizational performance improvements, they determine the optimal timing and location for new lines, facilities, and capacity investments. They spearhead our preparation for future production needs.

Industrialization: From Design Concept to Manufacturing Execution

Our design engineers at Proterra create industry-leading battery solutions focused on safety and performance. My manufacturing engineers then translate these concepts into robust manufacturing processes and systems, ensuring we produce new products right the first time, at the right cost, and in line with customer quality requirements.

They ensure that the manufacturing system, equipment, and standards work in harmony to provide an efficient and safe end-to-end material flow and manufacturing process. Through our prototype and trial build phases they focus on ensuring that safety, quality, delivery, and cost targets are achieved through the industrialization of new products and plants and bridge the gap between design concept and manufacturing execution.

Strategic Sourcing: Building Supplier Partnerships

Alongside manufacturing engineering, sourcing is an integral part of my team. Without components, there is no manufacturing; without a resilient supply chain there is no stability in operations; and without cost competitiveness we will not survive as an organization.

As the Proterra R&D engineering team designs batteries, our sourcing team finds supplier partners that can join our supply ecosystem and provide the parts we need. We work to find suppliers who can meet our demanding performance and technology requirements and partner with them from development through long-term supply.

With geopolitical changes unfolding regularly, they monitor the supply chain for disruption risks and constantly look to improve the resilience of our end-to-end supply chain through Tier 1 down to Tier N.

Production Control: Supply Chain Orchestration

The real complexity lies beyond just sourcing components. Our entire planning process starts with customer delivery commitments and works backward:

• Customers expect delivery on a specific date—this is our commitment to them
• Our teams work backwards through shipping, manufacturing, and component arrival timelines
• The production control team manages suppliers both domestic and international with extended lead times—placing orders to ensure manufacturing schedules are met while minimizing inventory levels
• They schedule production plants to minimize work-in-process and changeovers while maintaining the manufacturing times required to hit customer delivery dates

Our Production control team constantly runs manufacturing scenarios, analyzes inventory levels, identifies supply chain risks, and working with sales, ensures the customer gets their product on time every time.

Safety and Sustainability Operations

At Proterra, we believe cutting-edge technology can transform transportation's role in building a more sustainable future. My environmental health, safety, and sustainability teams keep people safe while protecting the environment. They handle everything from production floor safety to our test lab protocols, plus make sure we're compliant with regulations.

But it goes way beyond just following rules. These teams manage hazardous materials, monitor wastewater, track energy usage, and work on reducing our overall environmental footprint.

How It All Comes Together

I lead teams across engineering, manufacturing operations, safety, supply chain, sourcing, inventory, and quality. But the day-to-day means constantly collaborating with sales, R&D, finance, HR, and our executive team to make sure our operational capabilities match up with where we're trying to go strategically.

The most rewarding moments come when teams work together to solve complex challenges.

The Real Impact of COO Leadership

Being a COO in battery manufacturing means orchestrating systems, relationships, and strategic initiatives that span way beyond the factory floor. It's about enabling success from raw materials all the way through to customer delivery, it's about delivering results today while simultaneously building the business for the future, and it's about aligning functions and ensuring that every team member feels part of something meaningful and knows how they contribute.

Yeah, it includes manufacturing. But it's so much more than manufacturing.