Carolyn Cade

Building a senior-led operations advisory firm

Carolyn founded and leads Cade Ops, a boutique operations advisory firm that supports mid-market and high-growth companies on strategy, transformation, operating model design, and leadership effectiveness. She partners with C-suite and senior executives to clarify vision and priorities, translate strategy into operating plans, design organizational structures and decision rights, and build the management systems and operating cadences that drive execution.

She also strengthens leadership pipelines through People Leader Reviews, talent processes, and leadership development, and designs and facilitates executive workshops that align teams on vision, responsibilities, operating mechanisms, and the leadership capabilities needed to scale and execute effectively.

Running a $2.5B eCommerce supply chain operation

Carolyn led a roughly $2.5B annual operation across Walmart’s eCommerce network, influencing more than $12B in eCommerce GMV. She was accountable for forecasting, network planning, third-party carrier operations, and internal delivery network strategy, and briefed Walmart’s U.S. CEO on strategy, performance, and roadmap. Her teams improved delivery speed, coverage, and quality while reducing cost per package.

Scaling Amazon’s last mile and launching a new business

As Worldwide Director of Operations for Amazon Last Mile, Carolyn directed global strategy across operations strategy, technology integration, and sustainability, delivering more than $1B in savings and $10B in new revenue. She scaled last-mile technology across North America, Europe, and Japan, built new customer offerings and infrastructure, and developed the Climate Pledge strategy for last-mile operations.

Earlier, she was selected to launch Amazon Shipping, growing it from startup to a national footprint in under a year: from 1 to 9 cities, from 2 to more than 40 facilities, and a 150x increase in volume. Before that, as general manager of a 1.2 million square-foot facility with about 3,000 employees and a budget of more than $400M, she improved peak productivity by 17.3%, cut the first-aid incident rate by 35%, and raised customer experience metrics from 98.5% to 99.8%.

Engineering, automation, and production at scale

At Boeing, Carolyn led $175M in automation implementation for the new 777X automation system, coordinating engineering, facilities, quality, IT, and operations. As a 787 manufacturing manager, she quadrupled her team’s job completion rate by streamlining the weekly schedule and was one of four production system leaders responsible for fixing broken processes ahead of the next rate increase. She later managed a team incorporating new materials and processes into the next-generation airplane and production system, including the CTO’s top-10 strategic program on process control.

She began her career at Kennedy Space Center, leading the assembly operations team that completed International Space Station hardware for three shuttle missions, and received the Launch Director’s Award and General Manager’s Award for a Lean initiative that saved more than 7,500 labor hours.