People Who Plan | Inside the Minds of Modern Operators

About People Who Plan | Inside the Minds of Modern Operators

Every business runs on people who plan. People Who Plan goes inside the minds of the operators, founders, and builders who do it every week — the decisions they make, the frameworks they use, and the hard lessons they've learned along the way.

Publisher

Atomic

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

20 Mar 2026

Latest episode

5 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

19 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   5 Oct 2026

   Ep. 19 | Jesse Guzman, CEO & Co-Founder @ Zucca

   Plenty of mid-market food and beverage brands, some doing hundreds of millions in revenue, still run product development out of spreadsheets. A single launch can take 12 to 18 months and move through R&D, brand, operations, and a co-manufacturer, with a lot of places for things to go wrong. Before starting Zucca, Jesse Guzman had more than 100 conversations with people inside that process and heard the same problem over and over: details slip through the cracks. Jesse is co-founder and CEO of Zucca, a Seattle startup building an operating system for CPG product development. Before that he worked in brand strategy at Prophet, in biz ops at NerdWallet, as chief of staff at Rain, and at the venture studio Pioneer Square Labs, where Zucca started. He joins Jeremy Pomp and Chad Brinton to talk about why product development is under so much pressure right now. New federal and state rules on healthy claims, front-of-pack labels and food dyes. GLP-1s changing what people want from their food. Consumers who expect brands to react in weeks, not years. And AI finally making the problem workable. Jesse walks through what really happens when you pull one dye out of a product: the replacement can change the taste, texture and cost, push you outside your current supply chain, and break claims you were printing on pack. Also in this one: why enterprise PLM software never came downmarket; turning a SharePoint folder of ingredient specs into a structured ingredient database; a brand lead who got in front of a national retailer's buyer in a few months instead of over a year; capturing the reasoning behind product decisions so expertise stays when people leave; why Zucca paid an independent evaluator to try to prove its own nutrition label engine wrong; and Chad on what a missed launch did to the revenue and inventory plan at Made In. Chapters 00:00 Intro 01:10 Jesse's path: Prophet, NerdWallet, Rain, Pioneer Square Labs 02:32 What's broken in CPG product development 04:45 Running development in parallel instead of in sequence 07:16 Why now: regulation, GLP-1s, and speed 11:39 From over a year to a few months with a national retailer 13:44 What a missed launch does to the plan 16:48 Why enterprise PLM never reached mid-market brands 21:03 Capturing the "why" before people leave 21:56 Paying someone to prove your product wrong 24:07 The unglamorous middle 28:30 What's next for Zucca Guest: Jesse Guzman, CEO & Co-Founder @ Zucca Hosts: Jeremy Pomp & Chad Brinton, Atomic

2. 

   31 Aug 2026

   Ep. 18 | Aaron Alpeter, Founder & CEO @ Izba Group

   Everybody knows what S&OP is. Everybody has an idea of how it works. And nobody is happy with theirs. Aaron Alpeter has seen that problem from both extremes. He came up through Unilever's supply chain program when it was ranked the best in the world, then spent a decade in C-level operating roles at Lululemon, The Farmer's Dog, The Flex Company, and Hubble. In 2016 he founded izba, which helps consumer brands start, scale, and eventually sell. He joins Jeremy Pomp and Michael Rossiter to strip S&OP down to something a founder can actually run: three questions, every month. What do we want to happen? What do we think is going to happen? What actually happened? The meetings, the templates, the models — all of it is downstream of holding the tension between those three. Then the harder half: culture. Aaron walks through the archetypes his team developed at izba — command-and-control (Ralph Lauren, in his 90s, still signs off on every piece of merchandise with his name on it), franchise and bottoms-up (KFC corporate asking its franchisees, politely, to please sell more), and consensus-driven (Unilever, P&G, everyone locked in a room until somebody gives up). His argument: the failure mode is almost never the process. It's running the wrong process for the culture you actually have. Don't fight the culture. Harness it. Also in this one: why he wants to retire the word "forecast," or at least demote it to a verb; why the hardest cultural transition in planning is post-acquisition, told through a target-setting mismatch between Mirror and Lululemon that nobody caught for six months; Michael on turning tribal knowledge into executable code, and why operations runs half a click behind finance on AI adoption (finance has a general ledger — ops has no unified data model); and Aaron's closing advice to founders, which is just consistency — with the Hubble Contacts story where eighteen months of boring, repeated forecasts bought enough factory trust that they wildly oversold launch on thirty days of inventory without a single stockout. Disclosure: Aaron is an advisor to Atomic. Guest: Aaron Alpeter, Founder & CEO @ izba Hosts: Jeremy Pomp & Michael Rossiter, Atomic People Who Plan goes inside the minds of modern operators. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

3. 

   3 Aug 2026

   Ep. 17 | Jennifer Hernandez, Director of Operations @ BK Beauty

   People Who Plan — Ep. 17Running a Supply Chain on Spreadsheets (feat. Jennifer Hernandez, Director of Operations @ BK Beauty) Two months ago, Jennifer Hernandez downloaded Claude for the first time. Today she runs the entire supply chain of a fast-growing beauty brand with it. Jennifer is Director of Operations at BK Beauty, where she owns planning, forecasting, purchasing, freight, and fulfillment — on a deliberately lean stack. No ERP. No WMS. Shopify as the source of truth, and spreadsheets for everything else, by design. She joins Jeremy Pomp and Michael Rossiter to walk through what changed: purchase orders that took hours now take ten minutes, a freight-and-customs document workflow that runs off a single uploaded PDF, and a daily brief that reads her email, Slack, and project board before she sits down. In her words, "it's like having four more people on my team that I don't have." We also get into the path that got her here — 15 years at Target, a promotion ceiling she couldn't get past without a degree, the overnight logistics job she took on purpose, and the boss who gave her what she calls the kindest kick in the ass she could have received. If you've been meaning to find time for this stuff, watch what two months did. Guest: Jennifer Hernandez, Director of Operations @ BK BeautyHosts: Jeremy Pomp & Michael Rossiter, Atomic People Who Plan goes inside the minds of modern operators. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

4. 

   13 Jul 2026

   Ep. 16 | Brian Quinn & Daniel Spurlock, AE's @ Atomic

   Buying AI-native software isn't like buying traditional SaaS — and treating it like it is is why a lot of rollouts stall. Atomic AEs Brian Quinn and Daniel Spurlock join co-founder Michael Rossiter to unpack what really happens when a company moves off spreadsheets: why the old flexibility-vs-precision tradeoff is disappearing, how growth quietly manufactures its own complexity, and the point where adding one more planner (and one more spreadsheet) simply stops working. If you plan, forecast, or run ops for a growing business, this one's about the decision behind the decision. Guests: Brian Quinn & Daniel Spurlock, Account Executives @ AtomicHost: Michael Rossiter, Co-Founder @ Atomic People Who Plan goes inside the minds of modern operators. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

5. 

   29 Jun 2026

   Ep. 15 | Billy Blaustein, Co-Founder & COO @ Vammo

   What if the next wave of electrification isn't four wheels in California — but two wheels in São Paulo? In this episode of People Who Plan, Jeremy Pomp and Michael Rossiter reconnect with their former Tesla colleague Billy Blaustein, Co-Founder & COO of Vammo — now Latin America's largest electric-motorcycle and battery-swapping platform. From the Model 3 trenches to building on the ground in Brazil, Billy breaks down the operations story behind 5,000+ electric motorcycles, a million-plus battery swaps, and 700 swap stations doing 30,000 swaps in a single day. We get into why Brazil is the prime place to electrify a fleet (a 90% renewable grid, the cleanest of the G20), the CapEx-vs-OpEx math that makes electric cheaper for high-mileage riders, building a factory in the Amazon Free Trade Zone, and his thesis that the West is reading global electrification through the wrong lens.

6. 

   15 Jun 2026

   Ep. 14 | Jesse Hartman, Sr. Data Scientist @ Atomic

   Jesse Hartman took an unconventional road into data science — music theory, a stint running coffee shops in Austin, and a long-running coffee podcast before a boot camp landed him in supply chain. In this episode, Jeremy Pomp and Michael Rossiter dig into how that winding path shaped the way he thinks about operations, and what it actually means to be a "data scientist" in the age of AI.The conversation centers on how radically the work has changed. Jesse explains the difference between cognitive offloading (handing work to AI while staying firmly in the loop) and cognitive surrender (the trap of trusting it blindly), and why reviewing and approving code all day is its own kind of exhausting. He shares how tools like Claude Code have dissolved the old silos at Atomic — now he's shipping front-end fixes, and a customer feedback feature that once felt like weeks of work went live in about two hours.Along the way: managing the impossible economics of low-temp, non-homogenized milk at a coffee shop (you can't run out, but you can't overstock), why "the best fertilizer is the gardener's footsteps," and the throughline that ties it all together — AI hasn't changed the fundamentals of good operations, it's just exposed where planning is weak. As Jeremy puts it, the hard part was never doing more; it's making things simple.Plugs: Jesse's music on SoundCloud (EP in the works) https://hartman.coffee/music/ and thecoffeepodcast.com.

7. 

   3 Jun 2026

   Ep. 13 | Sean Agatep, Co-Founder @ Vincero Collective

   Ep. 13 | Sean Agatep, Co-Founder @ Vincero CollectiveChapters 00:00 — Welcome and origin story: Gonzaga, China, and five years in Guangzhou02:00 — Launching Vincero on Kickstarter with Italian marble watches04:00 — Twelve years in: building a brand around sentimentality06:00 — The gifting business: 40% of sales in Q4 and the cost of missing08:00 — The 2022 down year and the shift to disciplined operating10:00 — Engraving at scale and the discipline of doing less13:00 — Rebuilding the org chart by going senior offshore15:00 — Why hybrid only works with 30+ people in one city20:00 — High agency, AI, and outputs over presence22:00 — Three co-founders, lifelong friends, and built-in checks and balances25:00 — "Just fucking use it": Vincero's stance on AI adoption27:00 — Connecting tools to AI and adjusting prompts in real time

8. 

   19 May 2026

   Ep. 12 | Andy Hicks, Chief Transformation Officer @ Driven Distribution Group

   Andy Hicks is Chief Transformation Officer at Driven Distribution Group, and he has spent his career inside an industry where the customer expectation is one hour from order to part in hand — up there with blood logistics for pure speed pressure. The conversation moves through the three forces reshaping automotive parts distribution: SKU proliferation (Ford used to make two starter motors; now it's 1,800 SKUs), tariffs that flipped from a constant to a variable and forced sourcing pivots from China to Vietnam, Malaysia, and Cambodia, and the rise of AI-enabled platforms like Parts Tech and Nextpart that are reshaping how distributors price and stock. Andy also gets into Chinese New Year planning (the real shutdown is four weeks down plus a 50/75/100 ramp), his people-process-systems approach with IT pulled in early, and why scenario planning only works when finance is in the room before the PO button gets hit. Topics Covered:- The one-hour delivery expectation in automotive parts distribution- SKU proliferation: from 2 Ford starter motors to 1,800- Tariffs as a variable, not a constant — and the 40% "Made in Vietnam" rule- AI platforms reshaping cross-distributor pricing and stocking decisions- Chinese New Year: the real four-week shutdown plus 50/75/100 ramp- People-process-systems, with IT brought in early- Scenario planning that survives contact with the 13-week cash flow

9. 

   6 Apr 2026

   Ep. 11 | Cody Berenson, SVP of Operations & Services @ Siddhi Capital

   Cody Berenson started his career closing up a burrito restaurant at 2 AM for drunk college kids in Boulder. He fell in love with operations — the sheer amount of time, money, and energy it takes to get a product onto a shelf — and never looked back. That path took him from managing supply chains for nationally distributed brands to his current role as SVP of Operations & Services at Siddhi Capital, a growth equity firm with a twist: a full operating team of ten embedded alongside the investment side. It's a model that exists because Cody saw something that shocked him when he entered the investment world — how many people write checks without understanding the operational backbone of the businesses they're funding. Siddhi's team plugs into portfolio companies and beyond, rolling up their sleeves on everything from building manufacturing lines for products that have never been made at commercial scale to setting up S&OP processes for brands doing $200–300 million in revenue that still don't have the right planning infrastructure in place. The conversation covers what changes operationally at each stage of a brand's lifecycle — and what goes wrong when teams don't recognize the shift. Pre-revenue is its own animal: no data, high aspirations, and a foundation that has to be built on assumptions. The $1–10 million range is, in Cody's view, actually harder — everything is changing, retailers are calling, innovation is flying, and you're building systems while the plane is taking off. Past $20 million, the mistakes stop being small. A hundred thousand dollars. A million dollars. The margin for error compresses and the need for real planning rigor becomes non-negotiable. Cody's sharpest point lands on capital. S&OP isn't just sales and operations planning — it's working capital planning. In today's funding environment, where brands actually have to be profitable or on their way to it before they get their next check, getting inventory right can extend your runway by six months to a year. Getting it wrong means burning cash you can't replace. The episode also goes deep on how product characteristics shape operations in ways that aren't obvious from the outside. A sparkling water brand has dozens of co-manufacturers to choose from at every scale. A brand making something specialized might have two — or might need to build its own line. That constraint changes everything about how you plan, and getting founders and boards to understand the landscape they're operating within is half the job. Also in this episode: the cottage cheese revolution and why Good Culture couldn't make enough product even if they wanted to, how AI is flipping the 80/20 rule for operators who used to spend most of their time just organizing data, and Quality Italian's chicken parm pizza — which sounds gross and is absolutely overkill, but apparently phenomenal. Topics Covered: - From managing a Boulder burrito restaurant to SVP at a growth equity firm: Cody's path through operations - How Siddhi Capital embeds a full operating team alongside its investment portfolio — and why that model exists - Brand lifecycle stages: what changes operationally from pre-revenue to $10M to $200M+ - Why the $1–10M stage is actually harder than pre-revenue for operators - S&OP as working capital planning: why getting inventory right can change your fundraising plan entirely - The cottage cheese problem: what happens when demand explodes and manufacturing capacity doesn't exist - How product characteristics and co-manufacturer availability fundamentally shape your planning constraints - AI for operators: moving from 80% data wrangling to faster, cheaper decision-making - Why writing a good AI prompt is actually an operational discipline — you still need to know the answers to the test - The case for formalizing processes before automating them

10. 

    26 Mar 2026

    Ep. 10 | Corey Sisson, VP Sales Strategy & Planning @ SmartSweets

    Corey Sisson spent 16 years at General Mills — one of the largest CPG companies on the planet, home to billion-dollar brands and decades of institutional process. Then he left for Smart Sweets, a scrappy Canadian better-for-you candy startup, to build its sales planning function from scratch. The two worlds could not be more different, and Corey has thought harder than most about exactly how and why.He is now the VP of Sales Strategy and Planning at Smart Sweets, where he oversees the planning function that bridges field sales and supply chain, and has recently taken on the company's US club channel — including a Costco rollout that was literally happening as they recorded. Four years in, he describes the ride as equal parts adrenaline and gray hairs.The conversation goes deep on what it actually takes to plan for an emerging CPG brand. At General Mills, you have 19 cuts of data, a merchandising team fixing your shelves, and layers of process built up over 150 years. At Smart Sweets, you have fewer data points, no dedicated merchandiser, and a pace of change that makes every retail call a potential re-forecast. Corey is remarkably honest about the gap: the math of demand planning looks simple from the supply side — units per store, per week, times store count — until a retailer calls two days later and contracts your shelf space, pulls a display, or shifts your facings. That's not a forecasting failure. That's just the reality of how the CPG world works.His take on healthy tension between sales and supply is one of the sharpest in the series: you can't build a brand if you don't have product on shelf, and you can't have product on shelf without a supply plan that can move fast enough to capture opportunities when they show up. Miss that window and you've handed revenue back to a behemoth competitor — one who absolutely has a merchandising team.Also in this episode: what Corey had to unlearn after 16 years at a highly matrixed organization, why making a call and owning it is a skill you have to actively develop, and what Smart Sweets has coming down the innovation pipeline in 2026.

11. 

    26 Mar 2026

    Ep. 9 | Kenzie Parton, VP Global Planning @ Kendo Brands, Inc.

    Kenzie Parton graduated from CU Boulder with a degree in applied math and civil engineering. Then she decided she didn't want to be an engineer. What followed was 13 years at Levi Strauss — and a masterclass in how to build a planning career that cuts across finance, operations, and global supply chain.Kenzie is now the VP of Global Planning at Kendo Brands, the LVMH-owned beauty company behind Fenty Beauty, Marc Jacobs Beauty, and others. But getting there required a leap: in the summer of 2020, mid-pandemic, she took a cold call that led her to leave one of the most iconic brands in the world to build a planning organization from scratch. The team she inherited had been through reorg after reorg. Turnover was high. The planning tool wasn't built for planning. And the expectation of what the planning function was even supposed to do needed to be reset from the ground up.What she built over the next three years — a new leadership team, a new mindset, and a new Anaplan implementation that automated months of manual re-forecasting work — is the kind of story that doesn't get told enough about what it actually takes to run a high-performing planning org.Kenzie is also an Atomic Advisor and recently completed a Berkeley certificate in AI Business Strategy. Her take on AI in planning is grounded and refreshingly honest: the technology is maturing fast, but forecast accuracy at 70% is still considered excellent, and the real unlock isn't better algorithms — it's connected data, financial consequence modeling, and planners who can translate numbers into business decisions.Her advice for early-career planners is just as sharp: curiosity is the skill that compounds. Understand the whole business, not just your slice of it. Break through silos before they become walls. And never lose sight of the fact that planners are making some of the biggest capital allocation decisions in the company — even when the work feels like it's happening at the SKU level.

12. 

    26 Mar 2026

    Ep. 8 | Archie Durfee, Sr. Director of Sourcing & Supply Planning @ Ro

    Archie Durfee didn't plan to be a planner. He went to school for sport management, moved to Chicago with his girlfriend, couldn't find a job, and ended up temping at Radio Flyer answering calls about replacement wagon parts. Then a director asked if anyone wanted to stay after hours and pick orders in the warehouse. Archie raised his hand — and that decision set the course of his career.He is now the Senior Director of Sourcing and Supply Planning at Ro, the direct-to-consumer healthcare company. His current challenge: planning supply for the Wegovy pill — the first GLP-1 weight loss medication available in oral form — inside one of the most constraint-dense supply chains you'll find outside of aerospace. Think pharmacy licensing requirements across 50 states, inventory that can't be rebalanced once it's placed, expiration dating that has to align with 12-month patient subscription plans, and a product with sky-high demand and a very expensive unit cost. Welcome to pharma planning.Before Ro, Archie built his ops foundation at Radio Flyer — doing logistics, warehouse layout, WMS implementation, and eventually opening a European distribution center — before landing at Quip, the DTC oral care startup, where a VP handed him inventory planning because he "looked smart." He ran with it.Along the way, Archie became a founding member of Startups, the operator community that has quietly become one of the most trusted networks for supply chain and ops professionals. He describes it as rare: a place where people ask hard questions without competitive posturing, share real problems, and actually help each other.The conversation covers the limits of AI in high-growth startup forecasting, why persistence is the single most underrated trait in a planner, and how the real unlock for agentic AI in supply chain isn't better dashboards — it's automating the relentless follow-up work that planners spend half their lives doing.Topics Covered:- Planning GLP-1 medications at Ro: licensing networks, expiration dating, and non-transferable pharmacy inventory- Why short lead times in pharma are the silver lining that balances out everything else- Archie's origin story: Radio Flyer → Quip → Ro and the rotational learning mindset that got him there- Why persistence can't be taught — and how he uses AI as a "bulldog coach" to help his team ask better questions- The difference between managing a plan and managing the variables in the plan- Agentic AI and the future of supplier follow-up in supply chain- Where AI struggles in high-growth startup forecasting (and where it'll absolutely crush it)- The Startups operator community: what makes it work and why operators are uniquely willing to collaborate- Being an efficiency hawk at home: the one correct way to load a dishwasher

13. 

    26 Mar 2026

    Ep. 7 | Lyndsay Skeegan, COO @ ShelterBox USA

    What do fine arts, Saks Fifth Avenue, Tesla, and global disaster relief have in common? Lyndsay Skeegan's career.Lyndsay is the Chief Operating Officer of ShelterBox USA, a global humanitarian organization that provides emergency shelter to families who have lost their homes to disasters and conflict. ShelterBox has supported over 3 million people across 25 years of operations — and Lyndsay oversees everything from finance and HR to data and analytics and sales operations. Before getting there, she built one of the most unconventional planning careers you'll ever hear about.She started in a contemporary art gallery in New York City. Then, determined to break into fashion, she did something most people wouldn't: she took a night and weekend job at Banana Republic to earn her shot at a buyer position, went back to the recruiter who'd turned her down, and got hired. From there she climbed through Saks Fifth Avenue, MoMA, Coach, and a series of luxury retail startups — mastering merchandise planning by borrowing textbooks, cold-asking colleagues for their favorite Excel formulas, and learning everything on the job.Then came Tesla. Lyndsay joined as part of the team building the direct-to-consumer planning and allocation function from the ground up. She describes that era the way a lot of Tesla alumni do: forged in fire, urgency as a daily operating mode, and a bond with teammates that has outlasted the company itself. After Tesla, she helped spin up a logistics and warehouse program at an EV startup, then took a deliberate sabbatical to pursue passion projects — launching a free financial education program for women and marginalized communities, developing a horse-based experiential leadership program, and running her jewelry company with 100% of proceeds going to charity.Now at ShelterBox, she's applying every tool in that toolkit — strategic planning processes, KPI infrastructure, AI experimentation, living SOPs — in service of the mission: no one without shelter.This conversation is a masterclass in what it looks like to be biased toward action, comfortable with chaos, and deeply committed to turning both into process.Topics Covered:- How Lyndsay broke into merchandise planning with zero retail experience- The career path from fine arts → Saks → MoMA → Coach → Tesla → nonprofit COO- What Tesla taught her about grit, urgency, and building teams under resource constraints- How she thinks about SOPs as living documents — not locked-in rules- ShelterBox USA's mission and how it responds to global disasters and conflict- Balancing urgency with a healthy, sustainable team culture- How the nonprofit sector is approaching AI adoption (and where it lags behind)- The mock disaster deployment she participated in just weeks into her role- Her horse-based leadership development program and why horses make great coaches

14. 

    23 Mar 2026

    Ep. 6 | Aaron Hoag, VP Operations @ First Day

    Aaron Hoag has been geared to say yes his entire career — and it started before he ever worked for a brand. He spent eight years at a freight forwarding startup watching scrappy founders steal business from companies ten times their size, and he learned early that "we can't do that" is almost never the right first answer.In this episode, Aaron walks through a career that moved from customs brokerage to Cost Plus World Market to some of the most recognizable names in beauty — goop, Kendo, and First Day — and what stays constant across all of it. The conversation gets into what makes beauty uniquely brutal to plan: when you're making formulated products instead of buying finished goods, a single SKU can cascade into a dozen planning streams across packaging components, raw materials, and contract manufacturers, all with different lead times. And that's before you add 50 shades of foundation.Aaron also makes the case for what a great S&OP meeting actually looks like — and it's not what most companies are running. The word he keeps coming back to is collaboration. Not the kind people claim to want, but the kind where people actually show up with open hands instead of defended turf.Topics covered:How eight years in freight forwarding built a planning foundation most ops leaders never getThe "geared to say yes" philosophy — and why it's a mindset, not a blank checkWhy beauty supply chains are among the most complex in consumer goodsBalancing tactical firefighting with building something sustainable, predictable, and repeatableWhat genuine S&OP collaboration looks like — and why it's rarer than it should beWhere AI fits into the future of inventory planning

15. 

    23 Mar 2026

    Ep. 5 | 2026 Goal Setting for Planners & Operators with Michael Rossiter

    Most planning teams run their S&OP once a month. They spend weeks preparing, pack everyone into a room, and walk out with a plan that's already starting to go stale. Michael Rossiter thinks there's a fundamentally better way — and in this episode, he and Jeremy break down exactly what that looks like.It starts with a distinction that sounds simple but changes everything: target, forecast, and plan are not the same thing. A target is what you want to happen. A forecast is what you think will happen. A plan is the honest reconciliation of both — and confusing the three is where most of the tension in S&OP meetings comes from.The bigger shift is cadence. When planning runs monthly, every meeting becomes high-stakes and political. When it runs daily — automatically, at the SKU level — the drama disappears. Everyone works off the same scoreboard, misses get caught early, and the conversation moves from "whose numbers are right" to "what do we do about it."Michael walks through how this plays out live in Atomic: drilling from a $12.6M quarterly target down to the individual SKU, channel, and week to see exactly where the business is tracking — and where it isn't.Topics covered:The critical difference between targets, forecasts, and plansWhy monthly S&OP creates politics — and how daily planning eliminates itHow to diagnose misses at the SKU level in real timeWhat to do when your operational plan diverges from your financial targetsHow to set 2026 goals that stay useful all year, not just in January

16. 

    23 Mar 2026

    Ep. 4 | Chris Gerardy, Founder @ Canyon Vista

    Chris Gerardy's career in supply chain started with a conversation he wasn't supposed to be having. He was 24 years old, no degree, managing a Famous Footwear store in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics — when the corporate allocation team came through, noticed he understood his store's inventory better than most planners they'd met, and offered him a job. He moved to Wisconsin two months later and never looked back.In this episode, Chris walks Michael and Jeremy through three decades of planning across some of the most recognizable brands in retail and consumer goods — Justice, Vera Bradley, Champion, Hanes, Paula's Choice, and more. The stories are wild. There's the COVID sweatpants shortage at Hanes, where demand flipped overnight from 1.4 tops per bottom to 4 bottoms per top. The Paula's Choice TikTok boom that nobody saw coming. The Vera Bradley pattern test in San Antonio that got ruined because collectors cleaned out the whole floor and listed it on eBay.And through all of it, Chris's advice is remarkably consistent: start in the weeds. Go down to the SKU lot, the size curve, the store-class-week level. That's where the real signal lives — and where most planning systems still fall short.Topics covered:How shelf life requirements by channel turn a simple forecast into a supply chain puzzleWhat COVID did to demand curves — and why pre-2020 history is basically useless in some categoriesWhy new product forecasting always relies on sales input (and why that's a feature, not a bug)The outlier principle: pay attention to what's on the clearance rackCareer advice for early-stage supply chain and planning professionals

17. 

    23 Mar 2026

    Ep. 3 | Gina Jones McPherson, Director S&OP @ Starface World

    Gina Jones McPherson didn't plan on being a planner. She started as a purchasing intern at a steel company, bounced through inside sales, and eventually found herself building S&OP processes from the ground up — first at a 10,000-person manufacturer, and then as the very first planner ever hired at Starface World.In this episode, Gina walks Michael through what it actually looks like to walk into a company that's been running on a scrappy Excel model and make it work — without breaking the trust of the people who built it. Spoiler: the first move isn't to overhaul the model. It's to establish the process.They also get into how Starface went from 5 retailers to 30+, what tariff chaos looks like from the inside of a fast-growing beauty brand, and why Gina thinks the biggest misconception about planning is that it's mostly math.It's not. The math is the easy part.Topics covered:How to step in as a company's first planner without burning bridgesBuilding S&OP from scratch at a high-growth DTC brandForecasting products you've never sold beforeNavigating tariff uncertainty through scenario planningWhy AI won't replace planners — but will make them way more valuable

18. 

    23 Mar 2026

    Ep. 1 | Operational Excellence with Nicole Monterroso

    Most planning teams are drowning in process debt and don't know it. They're rebuilding the same model every week, pulling data from eight different systems, sitting in S&OP meetings that produce consensus but not clarity — and there's never time to fix it because there's always a deadline to hit first. Nicole Monterroso has spent her career walking into exactly that situation and helping teams see their way out.Nicole is the Head of New Venture Operations at DVx Ventures, where she applies the principles of lean and operational excellence to the unique challenge of building startups from the ground up. Her background is in automotive manufacturing — where she discovered, during her Tesla days, that the way she instinctively approached problems actually had a name. A mentor connected her with the frameworks of lean operations and continuous improvement, and she's been applying them ever since — from the factory floor to the planning office.In this inaugural episode of People Who Plan, Nicole joins Atomic co-founder Michael Rossiter for a conversation about what operational excellence actually means for modern planning teams. The core insight: planning problems are almost never people problems. They're process problems. And the fix usually starts with one deceptively simple act — making the process visible.Value stream mapping, standard work, visual management, cycle time analysis — these aren't abstract manufacturing concepts. They're the tools Nicole uses to help any team, in any industry, see where their work is bloated, where the waste is hiding, and where a single hour of focused documentation can surface months of accumulated inefficiency. The best processes, she argues, are rigid enough to exist and flexible enough to countermeasure when things go sideways. Which, in operations, is always.This episode is a masterclass in how to think about the system you're planning in, not just the plan itself.Topics Covered:- What operational excellence actually is — and what ops is (hint: it's simpler than you think)- Why planning problems are almost always process problems, not people problems- Value stream mapping as a diagnostic tool: how one hour of documentation surfaces months of waste- The concept of "improvement via subtraction" — and why humans are good at adding steps but bad at removing them- Why process documentation needs to happen before you implement technology- Rigid yet flexible: how processes should be designed to handle real-world chaos- The sociological impact of visual management — what happens when the plan stops living in one person's spreadsheet- Warning signs of a wasteful planning system: no documentation, defensive "that's how we've always done it" culture, no metrics on workflow health- How lean principles from automotive manufacturing translate directly to CPG and startup planning environments- The connection between operational excellence, team culture, and respect for the people doing the work

19. 

    20 Mar 2026

    Ep. 2 | Chad Brinton, Co-Founder @ Roger

    Chad Brinton built operations at some of the fastest-growing DTC brands in the country — Made In Cookware and True Classic — and lived to tell the stories. The ones where a planning mistake almost bankrupted the business, only for a global pandemic to turn it into a windfall. The ones where the marketing team would go viral on a product you had zero inventory for. The ones where you bet the farm on building your own fulfillment center and somehow it pays off. In this episode, Chad sits down with Michael Rossiter to break down what it actually takes to scale operations inside a high-growth startup: when to hire, how to lead a team when you're still a player-coach, why humans are wired to underestimate exponential growth, and where AI is starting to genuinely move the needle in ops. Chad is now Co-Founder of Roger, a fulfillment intelligence platform built to catch and resolve the orders that slip through the cracks — before your customers have to ask.

Contact People Who Plan | Inside the Minds of Modern Operators

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