Partnering with Product Operations
While nearly every software company relies on product managers, many of them are still learning more about what a product operations team does and what value it provides.
Product operations, more commonly known as product ops, is a relatively new role. Similar to other ops counterparts such as sales ops, marketing ops, and business ops, product ops is all about making it easier to scale the product team.
Here’s a valuable quote from ProductCraft about product ops: “Effective product ops teams accelerate feedback loops, increase efficiencies, and improve feature adoption.”
The role of product ops
Think of product managers like trailblazers. They’re venturing into new territory and they’re cutting their way through the wilderness. But, while they’re out discovering, their cross-functional stakeholders need to access those roads. Those roads aren’t paved at all, and that makes these roads confusing to follow.
Product ops are the people who pave the way after the path has been set. They provide the infrastructure necessary so that everyone can scale up. They introduce new processes that streamline the company’s activities so that people can work synergistically together.
Some product managers might feel that the word “process” is a dirty word. Isn’t the point of product management to iterate as quickly as possible, and to throw out the playbook and be creative?
Yes – that’s the job but only at small scales.
At large scales, it’s no longer effective to do so. While product managers shouldn’t be mindlessly following processes, they’re responsible for building up cultures, systems, and processes that create self-improving engines. The goal of product management isn’t to ship a product, it’s to up-level the org, and that’s why it’s crucial for product ops to exist for larger organizations.
Note that in small orgs, PM = product ops, in that there are much fewer coordination pains. Product ops really only shows up in orgs that have at least a dozen product managers.
Key product ops responsibilities
Product operations is all about making it easier to scale a product team. Therefore, many of the responsibilities below are focused on driving alignment and synergies for existing areas of ownership.
Product ops has the following core responsibilities:
Amplify impact and velocity by coordinating with cross-functional internal stakeholders
Establishing and refining feedback loops with customers
Identifying and advocating for standardized toolkits and repeatable processes
Translating analytics into actionable insight and holding product accountable for doing so
Clarifying and maintaining frameworks for experimentation and documentation
Let’s discuss each below.
Internal cross-functional coordination
Products can’t be built or shipped in siloes. For your product to actually succeed, you have to ensure that your internal teams are ready to drive your product forward:
Your legal and compliance team need to sign off on your work
Your information security team needs to ensure your product is safe
Your sales and marketing teams need to know how to position the product
Your customer success teams need to know how the product works, how it fits into user workflows, and when to recommend using the product
Your support teams need to know how to debug the product if problems crop up
Product ops can help to ensure that all of these crucial stakeholders are kept in the loop. By bringing in their voices early and often, and by sharing product team progress out on a regular cadence, product ops ensures that the product management team doesn’t get tripped up by a last-second blocker.
So, product ops accelerates velocity by ensuring that all internal teams are aligned and coordinated. Product ops also works with product management and other stakeholders to establish service level agreements (SLAs) to set expectations for the time that it’ll take when a product manager responds to a bug or a feature request.
Product ops also standardizes the rules of engagement between product management and other internal teams, so that it’s clear who should reach out, for what reasons, and by when.
You’d be surprised by how ad-hoc some product development processes are, and how much variance you might find between different product managers within the same company!
By standardizing the rules of engagement, product ops makes life easier for internal stakeholders so that they know what to expect from the product team. And, they also make life easier for product managers, so that product managers know what next steps they need to take to complete their initiative.
Product ops can also help to amplify the impact of the product through coordination and project management. Rather than ask the product manager to take the lead on release activities, product ops can drive the feature release instead using “micro GTM” plans.
They’ll know what feature it is, what date it’s expected to be available, and who needs to be involved in having a successful launch. They can train up internal teams, provide talk tracks, and ensure that there’s enough lead time built in to have successful marketing campaigns and effective sales preparation.
Feedback loops
As product managers continue to build out an increasingly complex product portfolio, they’ll need to coordinate their customer feedback loops across a dizzying variety of customer types and touchpoints.
Product ops can step in to remove lots of the operational burden and mental overhead. Product ops establishes best practices for how feedback gets captured, processed, analyzed, and acted upon.
Product ops also ensures that product managers don’t all wind up reaching out to the same customer, and can help to drive clean customer research protocols to ensure that customers don’t experience thrash from working with so many different product teams at once.
Product ops helps ensure that inbound feedback doesn’t fall through the cracks, and that product managers close the loop on any open threads of research that they’re tackling.
Toolkits and processes
As product teams grow, they start to use different tools for their work.
They might use Google Drive, Dropbox Paper, Quip, Notion, and Confluence for documentation.
They might use Sketch, Marvel, Figma, and InvisionApp for mock ups.
They might use Survey Monkey, Google Forms, Respondent, and Alpha for user research.
It starts to get pretty crazy pretty fast, and soon no one knows where to find information anymore.
Product ops serves as the gatekeeper. They help ensure that product managers use the same toolkit so that cross-functional stakeholders know where to go to get information.
On top of that, they also help craft new processes that make it easier for everyone to get work done. For example, product ops might craft standardized product spec templates, standardized feature request forms, standardized user research interview guides, standardized product results readout decks, and more.
Analytics and action
As product teams tackle more and more features, they need to consume more and more data and analytics. The challenge here is that teams can become siloed. If one team ships a feature and sees that their feature is doing well, they might declare it a win, even though they don’t see that they’ve caused a negative impact on someone else’s feature.
Product ops centralizes analyses across the company so that the entire product team is on the same page about what’s going well and what’s not going well. Furthermore, product ops helps to extract insight from analyses to propose actions for product managers to take. They’ll also hold product managers accountable for making the fixes that they need to make, so that customers have better experiences and so that the business can continue to grow.
Experimentation and learnings
Each product team will naturally experiment with new ways of working and with new hypotheses for what problems to tackle. While working scrappily is important, it’s also important to ensure that people aren’t duplicating work or losing their learnings.
Product ops ensures that teams are aware of each other’s experiments and helps to collate the learnings that come from each experiment. They’ll share out the results so that every product manager on the team can benefit from each other’s experiences, rather than having to reinvent the wheel themselves each time.
Why product ops is heating up
Operations teams typically come after the core team has been set up. Therefore, it makes sense that product ops has been relatively overlooked, since product management is still a new discipline itself.
But, now that more and more companies are scaling up their product teams, it’s getting to be too hard for the product manager to maintain core product management responsibilities while also tackling enablement and scaling processes.
For a great writeup on product ops in action, check out this deep dive from CommandBar, where they discuss:
The evolution of their data collection tools and processes
How they scaled their stand-ups to be more effective through async tools
The outcomes that they use to measure product ops success
That said, let’s be clear – in small product organizations, the product manager must perform the duties of product operations on top of all of their core responsibilities.
In larger organizations, where there’s the ability to specialize further, product managers typically transfer these operations responsibilities to their product ops counterparts.
How to be a good PM partner to product ops
The promise of product ops is a more effective company and a more effective product! What product manager doesn’t want to see these promises brought to life?
After all, product managers are judged by the impact that they shipped – and if they can have a partner to help them drive processes that amplify impact, that helps the product manager do a better job.
But, product ops can’t work without willing product management partners. After all, alignment doesn’t come for free. Here are four ways for you to ensure that you and product ops can drive the most impact together.
First, share your context about why you built the product this way and not a different way. By candidly discussing tradeoffs and tactics, you empower the product ops team to position you in the most favorable light possible – both to internal teams and to customers.
Second, provide transparency into the roadmap and why work was sequenced in that way. The more details you can share, the more product ops can build out objection handling to ensure that you can run your roadmap smoothly, without interference.
And, on the flip side, if they understand what you’re optimizing for, and they find new information that justifiably should alter your roadmap, they’ll know what information they need to provide you so that you can pull the trigger to change your roadmap accordingly.
Third, proactively raise your pains to them. Product ops is all about ensuring that the product team can do things more effectively! If you don’t raise your pains to them, they won’t know which process change proposals are relatively painless and which proposals are relatively painful. By letting them know your pains, they can ensure that they craft the best process solutions for your needs, while also balancing the needs of the rest of the organization.
And finally, please listen to your product ops counterparts with an open mind. They have a much deeper understanding of the pains of your cross-functional partners.
As product teams specialize, they may start to lose stakeholder empathy, and product ops is the best team to rely on to get the best bird’s eye view of what the rest of the company needs from product management.
If your product ops counterpart has a proposal, hear them out and give their proposed process a try. While you will face initial pain, you might be surprised by the long-run results – your life might actually be easier!
Summary
Product operations drives multiplicative impact across the company by providing the infrastructure for how product management interfaces with other departments.
By doing so, product operations eliminates friction, drives alignment, and removes mental overhead for all teams – which all ultimately benefits the customer and the company!
