A common theme when discussing Product Operations roles is “What is the value?”, “I’m sold, but how do I sell this to my leadership?”.
So let’s discuss the key facets of Product Ops, the benefits the roles bring to each and the value brought to common business areas. This is an enhanced follow-up to my Elevator Pitch for Product Operations
Key Focuses for Product Ops
The first set is expanded descriptions of my 6 Pillars of Product Operations:
Strategic Support
Product Operations teams facilitate the Product Management teams, squads and tribes in the production and maintenance of the product strategy, by ensuring effective, reliable communication, providing necessary resources & tools, and facilitating cross-functional collaboration to build, publish and execute the plan.
Often overlooked is the support provider to product & tech leadership by way of being a trusted partner and logistical lead for the implementation of new directives, and allowing leadership to focus on what we really need them to do: Vision, strategy, evangelism, line management, board/c-suite management.
Business Alignment
Product Operations teams are not only concerned with supporting the product & technology function, but are there to enable the entire business with what they need from the product teams to sell, support and market the products or services. Product Operations teams support the entire business but through a Product lens and product focus.
The inverse of this is facilitating the creation, alignment and monitoring of goals, OKRs or other objective-based metrics, particularly those that cascade down/ladder up throughout the business. Product Operations will not dictate what the goals should be, but will advise on alignment to business objectives, and facilitate the monitoring and review of them on a regular basis.
Data-informed Decision-making
Product Operations teams leverage and provide data and analysis to inform decisions, identify trends, and uncover insights that drive continuous improvement and help guide the overall product strategy. They facilitate the establishment of key performance indicators (KPIs) and ensure these metrics are tracked and reported consistently across teams.
Product Operations does not make the decisions but removes all barriers to the information and analysis for the right people to focus on making decisions, and is responsible for ensuring that access is continuous, expanded as needed, and ensure that information is being used in the decision-making process.
Valued Communication
Product Operations teams ensure that product teams communicate clearly, efficiently and regularly with internal stakeholders with information and updates that have value and can easily be consumed and reused in their own roles. Communication guidance focuses on delivering value to the right audience at the right time with the right level of information. Formalised feedback routes for suggestions, ideas and opportunities support efficient, focused inbound communications.
In short, everyone in every team has information (or access to information on demand) they need to be able to do their primary role excellently. And not access to the information, but the easy consumption of the information for their needs.
Iterative Improvement
Product Operations teams ensure existing product operating processes, frameworks and methodologies are needed, add value or require iterative improvement. This usually focuses on processes for data, communications, and collaboration (other Product Operations pillars) but applies to the unique needs of each team and each business.
This includes a key area for product - Discovery. Enabling teams to identify end users, set up conversations, be confident about what to discuss, have a suitable storage and analysis method for the feedback and regular reviews of the collated results. This is but one example of the detailed process improvement Product Operations focuses on, and how it removes the administrative, and operational burden on teams.
Cross-functional Collaboration
Product Operations teams foster open communication and trust, and facilitate alignment between various groups, such as product management, engineering, design, and marketing, and the wider business, ensuring everyone works towards common goals.
In doing so, trust, reliance, confidence, cooperation, shared aims - they all improve within and across the business. Product Operations as a dedicated ‘resource’ to build and enable this is a hugely valuable asset not often found outside of leadership levels.
The Quantitive & Qualitative Value-Adds of Prod Ops
So the bit you are all here for, what are the numbers? At a high level, this is virtually impossible to achieve, I am sorry to say. How do you put a monetary value on staff satisfaction and happiness with the changes you have implemented?
But, we can make some estimates based on efficiency/time saved, checked against the typical salaries of those most impacted by the changes and improvements. It goes without saying that this makes a lot of assumptions about the existing setup of product teams, and so the savings or income stated are based on those assumptions and may be more, or less, than you could achieve. It can also depend on the size of the organisation, technology platforms used and more. Use this as a guide!
Regardless of this, the list of qualitative statements where Product Operations absolutely does make a huge difference can be just as useful in pitching Product Operations around the business.
The following will estimate the typical number of hours a week (assumed to be averaged out over the year) for each task, and an estimate of the salary ‘saving’ of a product lead position with a salary of £100,000 for ease of calculations.
Value to product teams & tech teams
Remove the focus, by product and engineering individuals, on improving how to ‘do’ product management, and just do product management, and deliver great products. The Product Operations take the lead on this.
Saving around: 4h/week
Saving around: £10,800 per year
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Practical Product Ops to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.