Meet the Team: Kristina Duca

Introducing Kristina Duca, Head of Operations at Catchy. Kristina will discuss her approach to day-to-day operations management, big-picture business alignment, and the art of effective client delivery.

Kristina Duca

Chief of Staff

People & Culture

In today’s Meet the Team, we hear from Kristina Duca, Head of Operations at Catchy. Kristina discusses her career journey in operations management and the balance she finds in her role between setting long-term strategic plans and overseeing the day-to-day activities of a full-service agency.

A graduate of The University of Washington, Kristina has lived in South Dakota, California, North Dakota, and Washington. Kristina started a marketing career, wore many hats at many dot coms, returned to marketing, and then pivoted into operations management. She met Managing Partner Gary Gonzalez while working with him at a former agency, and after meeting founder and CEO Richard Hurring, joined Catchy as Head of Operations in 2021.

What are your primary responsibilities as Head of Operations at Catchy?

My role at Catchy is to identify and implement the tools and infrastructure needed to provide best-in-class services to our clients and create a culture of inclusivity, creativity, and inspiration for our employees while continuing to operate as a profitable and scalable business.

I love that no two days are the same and that I get a little bit of everything in my role. I manage the delivery team, working with them to elevate and improve both our client and employee experiences. I lead the PMO, manage resourcing, dabble in HR, delve into business management, and geek out to my heart’s content over data and spreadsheets.

You work on some pretty neat initiatives as part of your role. Which Catchy projects do you particularly enjoy working on and why?

My passion project has been the creation of CatchyCares, our Corporate Social Responsibility program. Our team is made up of so many generous, giving people who are already involved with a wide variety of causes and organizations, and it was a natural and easy decision to bring that spirit of giving back into our culture here at Catchy. I’m very excited to see this program continue to grow and evolve.

Which Catchy value do you strongly resonate with and why? (Collaborative, Fluid, Inclusive, Accountable)

I really, really resonate with Fluid. I love that both internally and with our client work, we can shift, redirect, and refocus as needed. Change isn’t a word this team is afraid of, nor is making mistakes, which helps us to continue to improve and grow in all that we do. My favorite Richard Hurring saying (and Catchy mantra) is, “Onward.”

What initially drew you to the field of operations management, and how has your relationship with it evolved over the years?

If I’m being honest, it’s because I’m a massive control freak. Or at least that’s how it started. I saw opportunities in gaps or places where processes and tools didn’t meet the needs of the end user (me). Luckily, being impatient and opinionated resulted in a solution-oriented approach and an addiction to making things better.

The past few years have certainly added a whole new dimension to operations – both positive and negative, but I’m finding myself very drawn to the evolution of the workplace, how we define where and how we work, and the unique challenges and opportunities we’re facing as we explore these new realities. There’s so much unchartered territory as we seek to understand all the different ways people learn, communicate, think, and process, combined with the unique needs in our environments, schedules, and homelife responsibilities. It’s a very compelling challenge to try and stitch all these pieces together in some kind of productivity/efficiency nirvana.

How do you strike a balance between maintaining operational efficiency and fostering innovation within an organization?

I’m big on the idea of continuous improvement (which also means a lot of failure and learning). The art of balance means having the experience to understand where we need to rely on the tried and true, and where it’s okay to experiment, blow things up, and see what works. Our team has so many amazingly talented and smart people with big ideas for how to improve, change, and transition our work to best meet the needs of our clients. It’s a privilege to help facilitate that.

What are you most proud of in your professional career so far?

It’s very rewarding to be at a point in my life where I can identify the talent and potential in others and have the experience and wisdom to enable and nurture those individuals in a way that promotes the success of their careers and our business. When you check your ego and understand that harnessing the power of other people’s abilities benefits everyone, it’s a very freeing and enlightened experience.

I’m also very proud of putting in the personal work to recognize my talents, identify the things that hold me back, and consistently challenge myself to try new and hard things.

Want to work with Kristina and the rest of the Catchy team? Well, you’re in luck - we’re hiring! Check out our Careers page for our current openings.