Product Operations: The secret weapon of successful product teams (Part II)
In Part I of this series, we explored various models and structures available to set up Product Operations for success. In Part 2 we will cover why it’s essential to clearly understand the roles, responsibilities, and goals of product operations, how to optimally structure the function, and some of the pitfalls to be aware of.
First, we need to dispel some common misconceptions that can limit the impact of product operations. ProdOps is a strategic partner for the product team, not just a function that handles processes, templates, and tools. These are important aspects of the role, but they are not the end goal. Similarly, they should not be responsible for actual product development, making product decisions, or day-to-day product management activities.
The mission is to help the product team make better decisions, reduce friction, and deliver more impactful business outcomes. It is essential to view product operations as a strategic function that drives the success of the product team, not as an obstacle. They work inside-out (think Product alignment to cross-functional teams) and outside-in (enabling product teams with data, analysis, and insights).
Product Operations is not:
- Technical program/project management: ProdOps doesn’t coordinate across teams during the build stages or facilitate team meetings, nor does it prioritize/define the backlog for product owners.
- A fix for weak product management: A strong product organization has clear roles and responsibilities where product managers are responsible for strategy, roadmap, and prioritization.
- A substitute for a data team: Good data analysts help product managers set measurable KPIs.
- A stand-in for a user research team: Good user researchers conduct interviews that reveal the user’s problem and pain points. User researchers provide qualitative insight to complement quantitative trends from data analysis.
- A replacement for product marketing: Good product marketers craft a storyline around the emotional aspects of features; they plan and execute the marketing strategy for feature announcements.
ProdOps also shouldn’t be a dumping ground for tasks that others don’t want to do. This can result in a lack of focus and resources and ultimately reduce their effectiveness. It’s also important to understand how ProdOps fits into the broader product organization. While product management, product owners, and program managers all play critical roles, ProdOps is focused on enabling and supporting these functions rather than replacing them. The best product organizations are those that recognize the unique value that each function brings and work collaboratively to achieve shared goals.
One way to avoid overloading ProdOps with tasks is to establish expectations for what the function will and will not be responsible for. An effective solution is creating a product operations charter with clearly defined roles, focus areas, and an engagement model. By understanding the boundaries of ProdOps, teams can maximize the benefits of this critical function and prevent ProdOps from becoming a bottleneck in the product development process.
Similar to product work, Product Operations need clear, well-defined goals that depend on customer needs. ProdOps can help the product team focus on the right priorities to maximize return on investment, and fuel product-led growth to increase adoption and retention. The scope can be extremely broad, encompassing everything from data analysis to user research to go-to-market strategy.
Product teams need data (qualitative and quantitative) to make informed decisions on product commercialization, product features, and customer requirements, and ultimately build a great product. As the product organization scales from a small to a large team, the amount of data that product managers have to juggle starts to increase exponentially. It is also quite possible that the information either is not present, insufficient, or present in scattered pockets within the organization.
It’s important to focus on the areas that will have the most significant impact on delivering business outcomes. This may involve improving communication and collaboration, simplifying processes, and ensuring data drives decisions rather than intuition. By focusing on the right things, product operations can help the product team reach its goals more efficiently.
So what should product operations focus on? That answer will evolve as the function matures and scales, to give product managers back time to assess market dynamics and get in front of customers. It’s also important to understand who is doing the work today — unless you have a dedicated ProdOps function, the people doing this “glue” work are probably not being recognized for their efforts.
A good place to start is a listening tour to understand the pain points of internal stakeholders and teams, focusing on the most impactful quick wins. You can find a great list of starter questions to ask your stakeholders here. ProdOps should focus on identifying bottlenecks in the product development process and work towards removing them. After prioritizing and deciding what initiatives to focus on, a discovery phase will help to better identify the problems and their potential solutions. Initially, they could focus on the following areas:
- Process optimization: streamline the product planning and development process, map the product lifecycle maturity level, deprecate unnecessary / poorly designed processes and reduce inefficiencies, and improve the overall speed to market. What can/should be left-shift in the process to be tackled earlier and more often?
- Research: conduct customer research, win-loss analysis, establish customer feedback loops, and voice of the customer insights; engage with internal customer-facing stakeholders, to ensure that the product team is building products that meet customer needs.
- Tooling: implement systems and templates to streamline strategy and roadmap development, data collection and synthesis, and communication.
- Launch: coordinate across product, engineering, marketing, support, and sales teams to ensure internal readiness/alignment, customer enablement, engagement, and post-launch tracking against KPIs.
- Data analysis: collate and analyze quantitative, qualitative, and behavioral data to identify trends and insights, run experiments, and validate hypotheses that can inform product strategy and development.
If you’re a product-led company customer-centricity is of utmost importance and your default mode of operation. ProdOps via experimentation, prototyping, and data analysis can leverage the data and give you insights into the product experience that will delight the customer.
Be careful! While trying to drive improvements, you can easily misstep and introduce speed breakers, creating unintended consequences with adverse impacts in the short term.
- Don’t create solutions in search of problems. Start by identifying what problems your organization is facing. Then, look at the core competencies of product operations and identify which ones would help solve your problems. Implement the narrowest set of solutions to avoid unnecessary overhead.
- Don’t create structure for structure’s sake. Every framework, process, and initiative should be aimed at solving a problem and serving product teams and cross-functional stakeholders. Too often, operations mistakes motion for progress, assessing their value through outputs instead of outcomes. Don’t do this. Be intentional.
- Focus on outcomes, not outputs. You need quantifiable measures to determine whether product operation is delivering value to your business. These measures should be focused on outcomes, not outputs. And just as important, outcomes over process.
- Start small. Don’t try to fix everything all at once, unless you’re a large organization and have the resources to build a fully staffed product operations team. Even then, it’s best to focus on a few key areas, and then build out from there, measuring performance along the way and making adjustments to ensure the function is delivering its intended value. Crawl. Walk. Run.
It’s important early on to balance knocking out the right low-hanging fruit (quick wins and demonstrate credibility), and flushing out the complex problems (to focus on over the long term) while building your roadmap. As the product teams’ needs evolve, so should the ProdOps model and focus areas. Change will be a constant on your journey, and effective stakeholder engagement and change management practices will be critical to the success of the function.
Product operations is the work that defines how your team builds products and it’s critical to get it right if you want a high-functioning product team. That’s why having a solid product operations model is essential for any product-led organization. Start with connecting the dots, identifying the key people, departments, and information to connect. It’s important to own only what makes sense, when it makes sense. This is where we need to be strict on whether we take ownership of something, or step back and let the teams take ownership themselves. Once the fundamental building blocks (process, tools, frameworks) are in place, let them run and get out of the way. This will create the space needed to focus on delivering more strategic value over time.
