What is Product Operations

This is the first article in an ongoing series showcasing a relatively new discipline: Product Operations. In this post, I’ll talk about how the Product Operations organization got started at Gusto and what we aim to do.

A little backstory…

I founded, and currently lead, Gusto’s Product Operations team. When I tell people about my job, I am typically asked two questions: What does Gusto do? and What’s Product Operations?

As Gusto has grown, I don’t get question #1 as often anymore — but in case you’re wondering, you can learn more about Gusto here. We’re pretty cool.

I too wondered, What’s Product Operations? when I was asked to create Gusto’s Product Operations team two years ago. I got curious, sought answers, and went on a bit of research spree. As I learned what Product Operations meant at other companies, I began to understand how a Product Operations team could potentially solve challenges we were facing at Gusto.

Conducting internal research

In the first phase of my research, I interviewed Product Managers, Engineers, and Customer Experience (CX) leaders at Gusto. We were at a stage of our company journey where we were experiencing rapid growth across our customer base, company size, and product surface area. I asked them:

1. What challenges are you facing right now?
2. What challenges do you anticipate facing as we grow?
3. How do those challenges impact our product development and customer experience?

From Product Managers and CX operators alike, the biggest challenge I heard was unanimously centered around connection, or rather, disconnection.

For example, I had CX team members relate to me instances of picking up the phone and having a customer ask about our new feature and having that be the first time they had ever heard of that new feature. “I was hearing about launches from customers on the phone instead of the product team,” said a CX leader, “I wasn’t even sure who to ask about it when it came up.” This certainly wasn’t the way we wanted our teams to feel as they helped our customers, and things had to change for us to be able to scale successfully.Our Product Managers and Engineers also felt disconnected from our CX teams.

When Gusto was just starting out, Tomer London (co-founder and Chief Product Officer) led both our product and service teams. As the CX org grew, we split the product and customer experience organizations because there were then over 50 people on CX, and communication between Product and CX teams also broke down. The product team lacked access to invaluable customer feedback and the deep subject-matter expertise of our CX team. CX teams felt a big disconnect from the product team, especially around knowing what new features were going to launch and when. They wanted a seat at the table in the product development lifecycle.

CX, Product, and Engineering were all feeling similar growing pains as we were scaling. Furthermore, we knew as we grew the CX org would get larger and more complex (it did) and that our product surface area would further expand (it did). I saw the writing on the wall — without deliberate investment in fostering connections between CX and Product, this problem would only get worse, potentially jeopardizing our ability to provide world-class service to our customers.

Conducting external research

With that internal perspective, I turned my research outward and interviewed leaders who had built Product Operations teams from the ground up at Airbnb, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. I learned about their journeys, and had the chance to ask them — What is Product Operations? Their answers varied, but all shared a core need to connect customers with the product.

So, what is Product Operations?

• At Airbnb: Connecting Product teams to the rich data that comes through Customer Experience (CX) contacts and our external feedback channels.
• At Facebook: The Product Operations team fuels product quality and engagement by representing the voice of the user and communicating key takeaways to Product and Engineering Managers.
• At Google: Connection between internal product development groups, internal frontline teams, and external end-users.
• At LinkedIn: Empowering LinkedIn to perfect the [customer] experience through cross-functional team communication and collaboration and using the voice of the [customer].

Product Operations at Gusto

Simply put, it’s connection.

Product Operations at Gusto fosters connection between our CX and Product teams to deliver an exceptional customer experience. We enable flow of information between those with feedback and those who can act on it.

We have four major accountabilities to ensure we live up to our mission:

1. Create internal feedback loops.
2. Ensure launch readiness.
3. Provide technical product support.
4. Elevate the voice of the customer.

Over my next few posts, I will be exploring each of these accountabilities in-depth to give you a full picture of how our team operates. I’ll also share what our day-to-day looks like, our talent strategy, and how we partner with Customer Experience, Engineering, Product, and Design teams. By the end of the series, you’ll know if/why you need a product operations function at your company, plus how to build it out successfully.