Operational excellence
for growing organizations
Shōjin is the consultancy of Chad Kohalyk (LinkedIn), providing fractional Operations and Chief of Staff services for scaling organizations such as startups or technology non-profits.
Starting his career as a web and print designer, Chad moved into product development, then to building product teams and technology departments, and finally to running day-to-day operations for whole companies. He is comfortable with all parts of an organization including Leadership, Product, Project Management, PeopleOps, Legal, and Finance.
Familiar with a number of strategy and management frameworks (eg Wardley Mapping, Jobs to be Done Theory, Entrepreneurial Operating System, Fair Process Leadership, etc) Chad's approach to building a company is deeply influenced by his product development background, resulting in his personal framework of "organizational usability" — especially useful in an era of remote work.
Examples of Shōjin services include:
- facilitating corporate strategy workshops
- vision, mission, and culture workshops
- change management
- standing up departments
- hiring global talent
- team dynamics and global culture mapping
- technology assessment
- GTM strategy development
- refining product vision
- communications planning
- “special projects”
Chad is also maintains a broad network of open source and protocol development communities through his work in the protocol space over the past few years, and his project Protocols for Publishers✨. He also participates in standards organizations such as the IETF.
Recent Shōjin projects include:
- new market vertical exploration
- international market expansion (Japan)
- deploying company-wide documentation and CRM
- managing contract software developers around the world
- technology event planning
- technical ecosystem development
- navigating technical standards organizations (eg IETF)
- researching application of GenAI in certain verticals
☼ 日々精進 — Every day, right effort.