Product Operations: What is it and when do you need it in your business?
An extract of my interview with ISL Talent: December 2023
Could you tell me a little more about product operations?
In a nutshell, product operations is a facilitator for product leaders and product management teams. We provide logistical support to product teams so they can focus on doing what brings most value from their skills – building great products for customers. Those logistical things typically cover data-informed decision making and providing dashboards for product teams to use to support their planning, communication standards, collaboration and alignment across teams, process and improvement setting and strategic support for product leadership, among many other things.
The role enables teams but does not make decisions for them. It advises, guides, questions, and ultimately supports the business on its quest for a more efficient product function.
Product operations professionals aren’t writing the communications to the wider business, product managers are best at that. We aren’t analysing the data, but we are enabling product managers to do so by providing them with dashboards featuring the data they need, saving them time collecting and finding the data themselves. All the logistical stuff is product operations.
Product operations work closely with product leadership, too, again to help them with the logistical side of things. For example, if the product leader says we want to overhaul the way we do product discovery, how do we get feedback from customers? Rather than them going out to their team and asking them to contact customers, which may take weeks or months, or not have much process around which customers are contacted, which are not, how often, where is the feedback being stored, analysed, product operations take all that pain away. Product operations will sit down and think ‘who are we going to contact and when?’, ‘How will we ensure no duplication?’, ‘What questions will we ask?’, ‘Where will the data live?’, ‘We’ll then implement a plan or support the implementation of a plan.’
Is there usually one higher-level product operations person within the business, or is it a team?
It very much depends on the size of the business. So typically, you’ll start with one who will usually be at a head of/ director type level. The role needs to be at a high enough level so that there is a sort of authority that comes with it. As the business grows, you would typically have a Director of Product type role with specialists sitting below them. It could be a specialist in data, discovery and customer research or marketing. The aim is for each of these specialists to deal with the product team in different ways and bring different strengths to the table.
At what stage of a business’s journey would you see them hiring their first product operations person?
This certainly isn’t your first product hire. Or your second, third, fourth or fifth. You’d typically be looking at this hire at the scaleup stage after your series A or series B funding. So, when you’re firmly established as a business and are on your way to becoming a more structured organization, product operations hires can come into play. Typically, a product leader will start to notice gaps as you grow from startup to scaleup and a product operations professional can come on board to help align the business, become more efficient and ultimately ensure those gaps are plugged.
What is the main value a company would see by hiring this type of role?
Anything that makes a business more efficient and focused on the delivery and outcomes is a big plus. What product operations professionals do is allow product managers and product leaders to focus on what they need to do to get products out the door, without needing to worry about the logistical side of things. As product operations, we want to provide the information, tools and facilities to product teams, to make the whole product journey much more efficient.
Any last words for a business considering hiring a product operations role?
Let somebody else deal with the backend, back office, internal stuff. It’s understanding that you want to grow and be more efficient. Efficiency and growth equal better teams and more output. This is also a function that focuses on what YOU need, not what some framework says you should align to.
The full article:
Thanks to Teagan O’Donovan & ISL Talent