I think certain types of teams are well suited for this when your customers are technical staff members. "Operations" is kind of a loaded title because it coul

I think certain types of teams are well suited for this when your customers are technical staff members. "Operations" is kind of a loaded title because it could be 10 different things but I'm guessing in your context it's at least related to tech because the VP of engineering was put in charge. If your job is to make the lives of your engineers easier by setting up infra and workflows to let them ship things faster and safer then you're kind of the perfect person to figure out what to work on because you're at ground zero experiencing everything first hand. Every bottleneck and problem you encounter is prime pickings for something to work on. Then you as a team (or as a solo person in this role) can figure out what to take on next. This is the type of role I'm in now as a 1 person team with mostly free reign to pick what to work on and it's great. All of the devs basically treat me as a consultant, then I help identify ways to improve things and implement those solutions. I mostly focus on infra and deployment related topics. I regularly bounce ideas off the person I report to and we figure out long term goals together (a very positive experience), but day to day or week to week I self regulate my tasks to move towards the high level goals.