The telltale signs you need Product Ops
Are you finding managing your complex product offerings increasingly challenging, with multiple teams involved in development and launch? What if there were a single function responsible for streamlining processes, improving communication, and ensuring everyone is working towards the same goals? Enter product operations.
What is Product Ops?
Product Operations is the work that defines how your team builds products. It’s focused on operational efficiencies and scale throughout the product and customer lifecycle.
- It serves as a bridge between customer success, product, and engineering.
- It supports the research and development teams to help them improve communications, alignment, and processes for a given product.
- Enable the use of product data to drive decision-making about a product.
- Effective product operation team fast-tracks feedback loops and feature adoption and increases efficiencies.
In short, Product Ops is essential wherever and whenever product management is gathering customer knowledge, researching market data, prioritizing, making decisions, and releasing products. At its core, product operations is about enabling and supporting product teams to do their best work.
But how do you know if it’s right for your team? Timing is everything when it comes to bringing on dedicated product operations. Too soon and you risk misaligning on the full potential, but waiting too long runs the risk of exacerbating existing inefficiencies. It’s a Goldilocks situation, and finding the sweet spot is essential.
So, what are some of the telltale signs you should look out for? Picture this:
Communication Gaps
- You have multiple teams working on your product offerings, but communication feels like a never-ending game of telephone.
- The amount of time product teams spend communicating their progress is detracting from their core work of building products.
- Product teams are siloed, with little-to-no cross-team communication.
Alignment
- It’s unclear who is working on what and how the pieces fit together.
- Prioritizing product initiatives feels like throwing darts in the dark, and decisions are based on intuition instead of being supported by facts and data.
Consistency
- Product teams spin their wheels, constantly re-creating the wheel due to non-standardized ways of working, templates, and practices that create inefficiency.
- A common framework for measuring and tracking goals, priorities, and work across teams is lacking.
Product Lifecycle
- The product development and launch process is a labyrinth of inefficiency, and you can’t seem to scale your products as your company grows.
- Product teams are spending a disproportionate amount of time identifying and investigating user issues, which is hindering their ability to deliver value to users.
If any of these sound like your everyday struggles, it might be time to consider bringing dedicated product operations to help streamline your processes and drive much-needed clarity and efficiency for your team.
Before jumping headfirst into adopting product operations, you should weigh some key factors to determine if its the right move for your team, and ultimately its impact on product team effectiveness:
- How big and complex are your product offerings?
- How many teams and functions are involved in product development?
- How important is communication and collaboration to ensuring alignment between different groups?
- Can you prioritize and make decisions based on data?
- Are you effectively leveraging insights from customer feedback and user behavior to build better products?
- Is there a need to streamline your processes and improve efficiency?
- And last but not least, can product operations boost product performance and revenue growth enough to justify its cost?
Some companies hire for Product Ops before the pain becomes too acute, some others only hire once the team’s velocity takes a considerable hit. It’s up to you to decide how you want to run your team, and whether that includes operational excellence. One thing people tend to forget is that Product Ops work has always existed — just because you hire someone to do it full-time doesn’t mean those tasks haven’t existed so far.
With product operations on board, you can expect better communication and collaboration between teams, centralized ownership on more efficient ways of working, data-informed decisions, and improved alignment to business outcomes. With the right team and strategy in place, you’ll be able to take your products to the next level and ultimately drive growth and success.
