Balancing Process and Progress: Tips for Product Ops Success

5 min readApr 12, 2023

Product ops is quickly becoming critical in product-led companies, ensuring that products and services maximize value for customers and the business. It’s a multifaceted role that requires a deep understanding of the product, the customer, and the business. However, getting started in this field can be daunting, with a broad range of responsibilities and practical skills to master. In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into the critical focus areas of product operations and the essential skills you need to succeed when starting out.

Product Ops builds a foundation for excellence by reinforcing product strategy with metrics, infrastructure, business processes, best practices, budgeting, and reporting. - Shaun Juncal

Product Ops is built on three essential pillars: Processes, Tools, and People. These pillars work together to drive product development from ideation to launch. Processes provide structure, tools provide necessary resources, and people drive the product vision and strategy.

Processes are the backbone of product operations. They provide framework and guidance to the product team, ensuring that everyone is working towards the same goal in a consistent manner. It includes the methodologies and best practices used to support the product development process from ideation to launch.

Tools are the enablers of product ops. They provide the product team with the necessary resources to execute the product development process efficiently. Tools are the templates, platforms, and systems used to manage and optimize analytics, collaboration, and execution across the product delivery lifecycle.

People are at the heart of it all. As a cross-functional role, you need to work closely with a variety of stakeholders who influence the product development process, drive the product vision and strategy, and ensure the successful delivery of products.

The mission of Product Ops is to pull everything together to provide cross-functional visibility and insights needed to define winning product strategies. -Melissa Perri

One of the biggest challenges in product ops is finding the right balance between the different pillars. Too much emphasis on processes can lead to bureaucracy, while over-reliance on tools can lead to a lack of collaboration. Striking the right balance means focusing on creating a culture of collaboration and communication, leveraging the right tools and technologies, and continuous optimization to balance processes and tools.

To achieve balance, you need to understand the priorities of the business and the product. Product Ops must work closely with stakeholders to ensure alignment and that teams are working towards the same goals. Striking the right balance means focusing on:

Creating a culture of collaboration and communication to ensure team members are working together efficiently.
Leveraging the right tools and technologies enables teams to work smarter and enhance productivity — select tools that are easy to use, customizable, and integrate well with other systems.
Continuous optimization to balance processes and tools, ensuring processes are always improving, leading to a more efficient and effective framework.

The key is to focus on creating processes that support collaboration and streamline workflows without creating unnecessary bureaucracy. This requires a deep understanding of the needs of different teams and stakeholders and a willingness to experiment and adapt as needed. Product Ops professionals must be able to balance the need for structure with the need for flexibility, with the ultimate goal of delivering high-quality products that meet the needs of customers.

A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

To be effective in this role product ops professionals need to possess a range of hard and soft skills, that when brought together enable the acceleration of product excellence for the organization.

Product lifecycle management: understand the end-to-end product lifecycle, from ideation and validation to market launch and post-launch support; focus on developing expertise in areas such as product roadmap planning, user research & experimentation, and product launch.
Communication: the ability to communicate succinctly and effectively manage expectations with cross-functional stakeholders.
Collaboration: develop strong relationships, empathize, and drive alignment with technical and non-technical stakeholders; leading through influence instead of authority.
Research and data: analyze trends and patterns (across quantitative & qualitative data) to measure product performance, understand customer needs, and identify areas for improvement to make data-informed decisions.
Change management: creative problem-solving and an understanding of effectively implementing process improvements that stick, striking a balance between standardization to enable consistency and flexibility to drive efficiency.
Accountability: take responsibility for your decisions and outcomes, and be willing to admit when things aren’t working as designed.

It takes time to develop and implement effective processes. Product Ops need to make incremental progress, starting with small changes and building from there. The crawl, walk, run approach is an effective way to make progress without overwhelming teams or stakeholders, minimize resistance, and ensures that the changes are sustainable. This allows for greater flexibility and adaptability as new challenges arise and demonstrates the value to build credibility with stakeholders.

Consider these tips for identifying quick wins:

Discover efficiencies and growth levers through data & insights; think about how to do things better, smarter, and faster.
Be flexible and aim for impact, no matter what form it takes — not all problems are created equal, nor do they need to be tackled at the same time.
Understand the pain points and prioritize — conduct a listening tour with your stakeholders; it’s critical to understand how many fires are burning and which fires to let burn while working on the others, oftentimes left-shifting to get to the root of the problem (focus on building the fire station over time as part of the journey to scale).

To make incremental progress, set clear objectives and define metrics to measure progress. Prioritize work that will have the most impact and communicate the value of the quick wins to stakeholders, celebrating successes along the way to build momentum. Start with a clear understanding of the current state and identify pain points. From there, you can develop a plan to address those pain points systematically to ensure that the changes are meaningful and aligned with the overall goals of the business.

In many ways, a product ops team functions as a miniature product team — the product process is your product, and the product team are your users. Therefore, success in product ops hinges on the ability to understand the needs of the users, and the product team, and align around shared goals for the improvement of the product — the product development process. By focusing on these essential pillars, finding the right balance, and demonstrating incremental progress to build credibility early, you can ensure success in this important role and deliver value to the organization.

Balancing Process and Progress: Tips for Product Ops Success

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Written by Scaling The Summit by Udit C.