Featured Leaders Series: Saying Yes Changed My Life – From HR Executive to COO, Thinking Like an Operator, and Leveraging AI in Business With Megan Paterson 

Posted in Featured Women Leaders Series, Featured Women Leaders Series, Featured Women Leaders Series
Mar 22, 2026

1165 words – (9-minute read)  

As part of International Women’s Month 2026 celebrations, Invest Ottawa teamed up with Naomi Haile of The Power of Why Podcast to produce this special Featured Leader series celebrating women leading in Ottawa.  

Five inspirational leaders are selected each year to represent International Women’s Month. These featured leaders represent more than titles. They represent builders, connectors, and advocates, the people doing the often invisible work of strengthening our city’s foundation so businesses can grow. 

They are role models who significantly impact our economy, community and society and embody the spirit, goals and values of IWM.  

What does it take to step into a role that feels bigger than you? 

In a fast-moving business environment defined by scale, complexity, and continuous change, career moments rarely arrive politely. For many leaders, the hardest decisions are not about skill sets or strategy. They are about identity. They are about saying yes before you feel ready and then doing the work to grow into that role. 

In this episode of The Power of Why Podcast, Naomi Haile sits down with Megan Paterson, Chief Operating Officer of Kinaxis, a publicly traded SaaS company. Megan spent nearly 18 years at Kinaxis, helping the company scale from roughly $20 million in revenue to more than half a billion. Her path from HR leader to COO is a case study in trust, operational discipline, and the practical leadership habits that deliver results. 

This conversation is for leaders who are navigating growth, identity shifts, and the uncomfortable stretch that often precedes real impact. 

The Power of Why: A Conversation with Megan Paterson  

Megan Paterson’s story is a powerful reminder that readiness is often built through action, not prior certainty. After 15 years at Kinaxis, including serving as Chief Human Resources Officer, Megan was asked by her CEO to become COO. She refused for five months. She had loved her CHRO role and doubted she had the precise pedigree for a global operations mandate. Eventually, she said yes, and the results speak for themselves. 

Images of host Naomi Haile and guest Megan Paterson appear on a promotional image, reading "From HR Executive to COO". In the episode, Megan unpacks what actually makes operational leadership effective at scale. The short list is deceptively simple: know the business, hire and trust strong functional leaders, make clear and timely decisions, and align teams around outcomes. Megan’s early months as COO were terrifying, she says. But they were also clarifying: the CEO needed someone who understood the company, someone he trusted, and someone who could execute. 

Real operational gains are often human, not technical. Megan rebuilt leadership where needed, hired closer to the functional level, and focused on untangling the biggest business fires first. In her first year, those changes contributed to more than two points of EBITDA improvement, an impact of over US$13 million. The win was not just in the dollars; it was in building teams that could sustain and continue the momentum. 

Megan is also candid about the skills she had to accelerate. The transition required deeper financial fluency and systems thinking at a company-wide level. It required different development conversations with senior leaders and a willingness to make hard leadership changes when titles did not translate into the work that needed to be done. 

The conversation also explores AI adoption from an operator’s lens. Megan argues that AI will change roles, but the practical imperative for leaders is to understand where AI unlocks real value and where governance, change management, and enablement are essential. For enterprise-level SaaS, she says, the narrative that AI will immediately replace complex platforms is overstated. The urgent work is governance plus enablement — giving teams the right models, guardrails, and capability-building so AI actually boosts productivity rather than generating noise. 

For founders and scale-up leaders, Megan’s lessons are concrete: you do not need a COO in the earliest days. Hire people who complement your strengths, expose yourself to operational role models, and build the financial and systems muscles that let you think across the company. 

“You’re often more prepared for the next role than you think, especially if you’ve been building trust, knowledge, and judgment over time.” – Megan Paterson

Listen to Saying Yes Changed My Life with Megan Paterson now: 

This episode is for you if: 

  • You are considering a role that feels too big and you want to know whether to say yes
  • You want to understand how to move from a functional leadership role into an operations mandate
  • You are a founder building operational discipline without a COO on payroll yet
  • You are managing an identity shift tied to a major career transition
  • You want a grounded perspective on leading AI adoption inside complex organizations
  • You prefer learning from leaders who have done the work, not just the theory

Someone Saw Something in Me

  • A personal story of leadership growth by Megan Paterson  

After being with Kinaxis for 15 years, being part of the scale and growth from $20M in revenue to over half a billion, going public, expanding globally, I was loving my role as Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO).

Profile image of Megan PatersonOne day, my CEO came to me and asked me to be COO. I had no experience, and I loved my current job, so I said no. In fact, I said no for five entire months. I knew Kinaxis needed a COO, and I’d been pushing my CEO to agree to hire one. But I believed we needed a strong COO with a track record of running a global, publicly traded company. Not for one second did I think I could do this job justice, and I was frankly upset with myself when I caved and said “fine, I’ll do it,” after I realized he was just acting like I had in fact said yes.

After about two terrifying months on the job, I realized that what my CEO needed was someone who knew the business, someone he trusted, and someone who could make tough decisions and get stuff done. I was all of those things, and that’s when I decided to embrace it. I changed leadership (even at C level) for the groups that he gave me. I hired strong leaders with functional expertise who I trusted to help run those parts of the business I knew nothing about. We worked together to make their organizations better, more efficient, more effective, and more cohesive.

In my first year, I saved us over 2 points in EBITDA, >US$13M, and that’s when I realized, I actually can (and am) doing the job!

About Megan Paterson 

Megan is the Chief Operating Officer of Kinaxis, a publicly traded SaaS company. She has spent most of her career building and scaling tech organizations. She has strong experience in international expansion, m&a, and building teams and business units for performance. Giving back to the community is a core belief for Megan, and she spends her spare time volunteering, advocating against domestic violence, and fundraising for various causes. For fun, she loves driving fast cars, playing tennis, and training her puppy Piper. 

Connect with Megan 

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Tags : Featured Women Leaders Series, Featured Women Leaders Series, Featured Women Leaders Series

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