The ultimate guide to product operations | Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles

Nov 16, 2023 1h 19m 30 insights Episode Page ↗
Melissa Perry, author of "Escaping the Build Trap" and "Product Operations," and Denise Tillis, product leader and consultant, discuss the emerging role of product operations. They detail its three pillars, benefits for PMs, and how to effectively implement it within companies.
Actionable Insights

1. Focus PMs on Strategic Work

Implement Product Operations to free product managers from operational tasks, enabling them to concentrate on strategic work, customer understanding, and core product development. This prevents PMs from spending excessive time on data harvesting and implementation.

2. Product Ops Informs, Not Decides

Understand that Product Operations informs product managers and leaders with data and insights, but does not take away their decision-making rights or dictate product features. Product Ops operationalizes great product management, while PMs own product decisions.

3. Retain PM Decision-Making & Execution

Product managers must retain ownership of strategic decisions, vision, prioritization, resource allocation, trade-off discussions, and the execution of those decisions with their teams. Product Ops supports, but does not replace, these core PM responsibilities.

4. Structure Product Ops by Three Pillars

Organize your Product Operations function around three core pillars: business and data insights, customer and market insights, and process and practices. This provides a comprehensive framework for the role’s responsibilities.

5. Start Product Ops with One Person

Begin implementing Product Operations by hiring a single individual to focus on the most critical, high-leverage problem area within your organization. This allows for demonstrating value and building momentum before scaling the team.

6. Identify High-Impact Area for First Product Ops Hire

Before hiring, conduct a listening tour and research sprints to identify where a single Product Ops person can make the most difference quickly. This ensures the first hire addresses a significant pain point and delivers immediate value.

7. Product Ops Reports to Head of Product

Ensure the Product Operations function reports directly to the Head of Product (e.g., CPO or VP of Product). This alignment helps integrate Product Ops directly into product strategy and operations.

8. Create Product Health Dashboards

Task Product Operations with developing and maintaining dashboards that monitor the health of your product, providing strategic insights like AR by customer segment or adoption by product line. These are crucial for leaders to monitor strategy effectively.

9. Centralize Customer Research Findings

Utilize Product Operations to aggregate all customer interviews and research into a findings database (e.g., Dovetail) that can be queried by anyone. This prevents duplicate research and makes insights readily accessible.

10. Build Research Participant Database

Have Product Operations create and manage a database of customers willing to opt into research, alphas, and betas. This streamlines the process for product managers and user researchers to find participants efficiently.

11. Streamline Sales/Support Qualitative Feedback

Leverage Product Operations to effectively gather qualitative insights from sales and support teams and feed them back to product teams. This also involves communicating how their feedback is being used.

12. Standardize Go-to-Market Templates

Product Operations should develop and provide consistent templates and processes for go-to-market plans across the organization. This ensures efficiency and alignment, preventing teams from reinventing the wheel.

13. Automate Product Ops with Software

Encourage Product Operations to identify opportunities to optimize and streamline processes using software, tools, or by building internal products for the product team. This fosters a lean, efficient Product Ops function.

14. Improve Executive Visibility with Portfolio Roadmaps

Implement Product Operations to create a portfolio roadmap view that rolls up information from tools like Jira into a strategic overview for executives. This provides transparency into big pushes and their alignment with company goals.

15. Build OKR Tracking Dashboards

Task Product Operations with building dashboards to track and visualize the deployment and progress of OKRs. This provides clear visibility into organizational objectives and outcomes.

16. PMs Retain Data Interpretation Skills

Product managers should remain comfortable with data, able to read charts, understand trends, and pull ad hoc reports from BI tools. Product Ops streamlines data access, but PMs still interpret.

17. PMs Conduct User Research

While Product Operations enables and streamlines the process of user research (e.g., finding participants, managing repositories), product managers are still responsible for conducting the actual user research.

18. PMs Own Hard Stakeholder Conversations

Product managers must continue to own and navigate difficult conversations with stakeholders regarding trade-offs, product direction, and other challenging topics.

19. PMs Inform Go-to-Market Content

Product managers are responsible for providing the strategic inputs for go-to-market plans, including working with sales and marketing to ensure correct positioning. Product Ops coordinates the process.

20. Coach New Product Ops Hires if Time Allows

If you, as a leader, have the time and capacity to coach a new Product Ops hire, you can bring in someone with the right skill set, even if they lack prior Product Ops experience.

21. Hire Experienced Product Ops if No Time to Coach

If you lack the time to coach a new Product Ops hire, prioritize bringing in someone with prior experience in the role or specific pillar to hit the ground running and operationalize effectively.

22. Hire Data Interpreters for Business Insights

For the business data and insights pillar, seek candidates skilled at interpreting data, telling stories with it, and communicating effectively to diverse stakeholders, often with a data analyst or consultant background.

23. Hire High-EQ Systems Thinkers for Process

For the process and practices pillar, look for individuals with high emotional intelligence, a strong product background, and a systems-thinking mindset who can implement and continuously re-evaluate processes and tools.

24. Hire Process-Oriented User Researchers

For the customer and market insights pillar, hire individuals with a user research background who are also process-oriented and skilled at operationalizing research activities, ideally with research ops experience.

25. Ask About Process Automation Experience

During interviews for Product Ops roles, ask candidates to describe a time they automated or built a system around a hated process in their job. This reveals their operationalization mindset.

26. High-Growth Product Ops Focus: Data

For high-growth companies, prioritize Product Operations efforts on business data and insights to effectively monitor product performance and gather strategic inputs.

27. Enterprise Product Ops Focus: Process

For larger companies and enterprises undergoing transformation, focus Product Operations on process and governance to establish an effective product operating model and infrastructure.

28. Distinguish Product Ops from Project/Program Management

Clearly define Product Operations as focused on improving decision-making speed and quality, distinct from project managers (time-boxed projects) and program managers (ongoing large initiatives).

29. Avoid 1:1 or 1:100 Product Ops Ratios

Do not aim for a 1:1 ratio of Product Ops to product managers, nor an extremely wide ratio like 1:100. The ideal ratio depends on the company’s instrumentation and needs, but a lean team leveraging tools is preferred.

30. Product Ops Enhances Skilled PMs, Not Replaces

Remember that Product Ops is designed to empower and enhance the work of skilled product managers and leaders, not to compensate for a lack of skills or replace their core functions.