Driving Efficiency and Collaboration in Product Operations
My interview with Dragonboat: June 2023
What are the biggest challenges facing your product teams?
Collaborating across teams on projects and shared areas of the product is an issue for sure. Teams are brilliant in their silos and their own ways of working, but can struggle when it comes to alignment across the teams, and as well collaborating across the rest of the business.
We invest heavily in this through other teams, but the biggest challenges are around standardizing this across all teams, across the business and across the variety of existing processes each team follows.
How does your team/management measure your success as Product Ops?
Largely, Product Ops is measured through the positive feedback from the various teams around the business – their acceptance and happiness with new or enhanced processes, ways of working, new facilities made available to them, etc. This is not just focused on the product division, but other teams’ interaction with the product function at Cobalt. In addition, success is measured by the increased efficiency of the team’s realized outcomes (again, largely this is the outcomes of the product teams), and the measures of success are by-proxy.
It would be easy to assume that metrics are an easy way to prove success within Product Ops – how many users of a process, how many page views, how many forms completed. But Product Ops is about people, not products, and so success measurement starts with a qualitative element.
In your experience, how can Product Ops help establish an outcome-focused practice?
Product Ops is an enabling role. A role to enable, predominantly, product teams to do their best work, and be supported by a business aligned to that work in the most efficient ways possible.
The outcomes to be focused on are set, by company goals, product leadership and management – Product Ops facilitates the alignment of those, reminds teams to be aligned, checks and balances and even questions in a ‘devil’s advocate’ role to prompt and push product teams to stay on the path. This includes reminders and prompts and frameworks to focus on bigger-picture outcomes rather than the journey to get there in more specific outputs.
This can include templates designed to relate enhancements and changes back to established outcomes, division or company goals, OKRs etc. But the establishment of any of this is done in support of product leadership, not in spite of.
Other than product and engineering teams, what other groups (in the company and externally) do you work closely with?
All teams. Period.
In fact, some of the best work I have implemented has been with the detailed involvement of the commercial teams, for the benefit predominantly of the commercial teams and their interaction with product.
Product Ops in a product-led SaaS business spans the entire company, ensuring everyone has access to everything they need to do their specific job and driving success for the business as a whole. We work on implementations and improvements that might cause more work for one team, but overall providing a net-positive outcome that is best for business (though of course, we try not to cause more work for anyone!).
The biggest advocates for product operations are those that can recognize there are better ways to work, that want to improve, and that work for the business overall, and not just themselves or just their team.
Read the full interview here:
Driving Efficiency and Collaboration in Product Operations - Graham Reed
Thanks to Dragonboat & ProductOpsHQ, and Ana Andrade