With an exciting new opportunity to join Accurx as a Product Ops Manager (POM), we picked the brains of one of our wonderful POMs, Hannah Gledhill, to ask her about her role.
1. To kick things off, could you give a quick intro to your role?
Sure! I’m a Product Ops Manager (POM) and I work with product teams focusing on driving growth. It’s a really varied role. I’ve worked on launching new features, increasing adoption of products, and integrating our software with the NHS App to name a few different focuses. This involves everything from analysing data, brainstorming and evaluating growth experiments to project scoping and planning, setting up pilots and coordinating cross-functional teams.
Like any POM at Accurx, I work really closely with Product Managers. While Product Managers are responsible for leading the team in scoping and delivering a product, my role has a more specific focus on how we launch and grow adoption of that product. This can mean leading on our efforts to increase revenue, or increase the number of product users, or increase the usage of active users.
As a POM, most of these growth projects start with understanding data. You need to understand things like how many new users we’re getting per week, what they’re doing on the product and what retention rates look like. This allows you to identify the specific problem you have to solve, do some brainstorming and run experiments on your ideas. Once you’ve found something that works, you want to turn it into a scalable process and you might hand it over to another team to run it as BAU.
2. What are you working on at the moment?
Right now, I’m working on integrating parts of our product with the NHS App so that more patients will be able to access it.
If more patients access it then more clinicians will be able to respond to patients and we think that will be a good growth play to get more clinicians on our product as well.
In practice, this means working closely with a range of people across Accurx, from Product Managers to Product Designers, Engineers and the Privacy and Clinical teams. I’m also working really closely with NHS Digital to ensure we’re meeting their expectations and deadlines and keeping on top of the necessary programme management.
3. How long have you been at Accurx? How does this role differ to what you were doing before?
I’ve been at Accurx for a year and a couple of months now. Before that, I was working at a consultancy, working on operational improvement projects in local government and hospitals. Coming from a consultancy, I was really used to planning projects months in advance with set deadlines.
But moving to Accurx, there’s more of a focus on agile working. With this in mind, it’s not common for us to put rigid dates on milestones more than a month away. Our teams works in a quick and flexible way that’s responsive to the ever-shifting environment around us. That’s not to say I’ve done away with things like gantt charts… only that I’ve worked out a few techniques to put a gantt chart down without it looking like one! I say that because, when you’re working with hospital trusts, GP practices or NHS Digital, you do need that more structured plan of timelines and milestones in place.
4. What are some of the big moments, achievements or milestones you’ve enjoyed in your role?
When I started at Accurx, I first worked on a product called Accumail, which enables primary care to communicate easily with secondary care. We were focused on getting more GP practices using the product. Giving practices a directory of useful secondary care contacts was our big growth play and after a successful pilot we had to work out how we scale this and create these directories for all GP Practices in England.
That was a big and complex project. We scoped and tested a bunch of ideas and I ended up hiring and training temps to help curate these directories. It was awesome rolling out that out to healthcare staff - we received great feedback on how useful it was. It was really satisfying.
5. How do you work alongside the rest of the Ops team at Accurx?
All Product Ops Managers and Product Ops Analysts are part of a wider Ops team that includes Comms, Commercial Ops and Assurance. Half of us are focused on growth and adoption in primary care and the other half in secondary care. We get together every week to share our progress and key problems and challenges that we’re coming up against. Everyone’s embedded in a different product team, meaning we’re all tuned in to different parts of the company’s product landscape.
6. What do you enjoy most about your role?
I love the variety. And by ‘variety’ I mean both the work itself and the people I work with. I really enjoy jumping between product teams, working on different projects, and trying lots of interesting experiments. I also love being faced with a problem that no-one else has solved before, breaking it down and working out where to start. It’s a satisfying process, wiggling your way through a complex, difficult problem to eventually find a solution.
7. What would you say to someone who is thinking of applying to our new POM position?
Do it! It’s a really varied and interesting role. There’s a balance of both internal and external facing work. Over time, it involves moving from one growth project to another so you have to be happy flexing to what the next big priority is. But there’s also lots of scope to shape your role.
You’ll need to be someone who is very keen to pick up and run with new problems and can use data to support the problem solving process. The role involves communicating across lots of different functions, so you also need the ability to interact and collaborate well with people.
It’s also worth being aware that I’ve found Product Ops at Accurx is different to most things you’ll read about Product Ops elsewhere. Typically Product Ops tends to be more of a PMO role with project management of a product team.
Lastly, I’d say feel free to reach out to any of the current Product Ops Managers on LinkedIn and ask any questions — we’ll be happy to help!
Interested in becoming a Product Ops Manager like Hannah? Check out our careers page for more on this role and many others!
