LPs have gotten considerably more specific about operational value creation in the last few fund cycles, and it’s worth knowing exactly what’s being asked so you’re not caught explaining your process for the first time in an LPAC meeting. 

The questions have shifted away from “describe your operating model” in the abstract and toward specific evidence. How many portfolio companies has the operating team actually touched in a hands-on capacity in the last two years, not how many they were nominally responsible for. 

What’s the actual before-and-after on a specific metric for a specific company, not an aggregate claim about value creation across the portfolio. Whether the operating function is a genuine value driver or a marketing line item that gets invoked in fundraising decks and rarely shows up in an actual board pack. 

This shift matters because it changes what evidence is worth building now, before the next fundraise starts. If your operating team’s work isn’t documented in a way that produces a clean before-and-after story for at least a handful of portfolio companies, that’s a gap worth closing well before an LP due diligence process starts asking for it, because building that evidence retroactively from memory and old board decks is a miserable exercise under time pressure. 

The practical move: for every meaningful piece of operating partner work, capture a simple before-and-after snapshot at the time it happens, not months later when someone asks for a case study. What the metric was, what changed, roughly when. It doesn’t need to be a polished case study yet. 

It needs to exist in a form that can become one quickly when an LP due diligence process asks for exactly this kind of evidence, which increasingly, it will.