When I think about operations or product operations, it's about how do you pull together the organization, not just the product team, but the organization as a whole to orchestrate all the different moving parts that impact that customer's experience, that impacts the efficiency, that impacts the outcomes of what you're trying to deliver.
Product operations is almost like the, I think you may have said this in your book, is almost like the glue that holds things together to make sure that everybody is synchronized and seeing and doing the same thing in the benefit of the customer.
I hope that, like I mentioned earlier, products can be seen as a strategic part of that equation and not get lost in some of the administrative stuff.
Where I've seen organizations be successful And being strategic, it is game changing for those, not even just those product works, for that entire company.
So I hope we continue to lean into that.
And I hope that product ops folks out there continue to fight the good fight because I know it is frustrating sometimes to try to constantly convince folks that what you're doing is good and valuable for them.
But when you can break through, it's so worth it.
Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers.
It's about how an organization supports products as a whole, the systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers.
With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader.
This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast.
This week, we're continuing our special series of compilation episodes.
This time, we're diving into one of the most impactful shifts we have seen in how companies scale product management, product operations.
Over the past year, I've had the chance to speak with incredible leaders who've built scaled or transformed product ops functions into high growth organizations.
In this episode, we're revisiting those conversations to unpack what product ops really looks like when it works and why it's become such a game changer for enabling product teams to focus, align, and deliver at scale.
Whether you're considering building your first product ops team or evolving an existing one, these clips are full of practical insights on making your strategy actionable, unlocking better decisions with data, and creating the infrastructure product teams need to thrive.
Let's get into it. First up, you'll hear from Quincy Hunt, VP of Digital Products at Cutter Airways.
Quincy lays the groundwork for what makes product operations truly impactful, focusing on structure, leadership, and the glue that aligns business and tech to serve customers better.
So when I think about operations or product operations, it's about how do you pull together the organization, not just the product team, but the organization as a whole to orchestrate all the different moving parts that impact that customer's experience, that impacts the efficiency, that impacts the outcomes of what you're trying to deliver.
Product operations is almost like the, I think you may have said this in your book, is almost like the glue that holds things together to make sure that everybody is synchronized and seeing and doing the same thing in the benefit of the customer.
When you are advising people on how to set up product operations and looking at this, are there core components that you've seen be very helpful?
Yeah, so that spans across the different areas that I spoke about before, about the operational structure or the organizational structure.
There's the technology component I spoke about, the product management, and then there's the measurements and analysis.
So those are the key areas that I see are the areas that I focus on for customers.
Now, when we talk about the organizational structure, the things that come up the most is organization. deconstructing and decomposing their product teams into smaller, more agile teams.
And within Amazon, we call this two pizza teams.
So these smaller teams that can be able to move quicker and respond to our customers and be able to experiment, iterate and move really fast.
It's also important as part of that team construct that you have your single threaded leaders, again, that really helps to accelerate your decision making.
And we find what I've seen in organizations is that sometimes you don't have clarity around who is that single person who's making the decision.
It's always, well, I'm not sure if I should make that decision because it may touch on Melissa's domain and I don't want to upset her or I think she should make the call or her technology area is going to be impacted if I make a call.
So I think that's part of an important part that I see.
The other thing I always tell some of my customers about that I think is super crucial and it sounds very simple is having those set of leadership principles as well as tenets.
Because what it is, provide some sort of guideposts in terms of when I think about my organizational practices and the structure, like what am I being guided by?
What is giving me a sense of, okay, this is the framework of what are the things that are important for the business?
What's important for the customers? What's important for my team?
So I think those are important things. And then the other part, which I think is super important, as I mentioned, is about the technology and as well as infrastructure.
So those things such as how do I decompose my architecture or my infrastructure to be much more microservices based?
And how do I leverage my APIs to ensure that I decouple all these systems that were hard coded to each other to allow for a lot more autonomy, to allow for a lot more flexibility and for us to be much more responsive.
And then it's also important that when you're thinking about technology and your infrastructure, it's not just about the technology platform that's serving your external customer.
It's also about your internal mechanisms that are serving your internal builders.
So how do we mechanize things or tasks to automate them in a way that is taken away from the work and the capacity that these product teams need in order to build?
So really driving automation of low value tasks to automate certain things.
And then it's also important to be able to have systems in place that allows teams to self-serve.
When you think about your APIs, is there an API library?
Is there a document repository where people can go in and find use cases around some of the experiments that you did and what were the outcomes of the experiments?
And then also it's very important, which I think is key and integral to when you think about technology and the business, is ensuring you have that alignment between the business and the technology team.
I cannot state how many times I walk into organizations and there is complete disalignment.
They have conversations on one side here with business team, and then we have conversations on the technology side and these two are not talking to each other and they have different objectives.
They have different goals and they're just not syncing.
So I think that's super important when we think about operational elements that help accelerate the speed of how we perform and build products.
And I always tell the funny thing is, Melissa, when I go into the customers, I always say the funniest thing, the most value that we create is not necessarily all the great things we tell you in terms of how you transform.
When we come in the room, that's probably the only time the technology and the business functions sit together.
And that's the best value that we deliver.
We're bringing these organizations together to actually speak to each other, which is an absolute insane thing.
So in the absence of us being around, they're doing things in their own silos.
When we come in, that's when they come in and speak to each other.
And I think that's where we create a lot of value.
And then obviously there's the product management areas that I spoke about, which talks about our working backwards, our narratives, our way we break up products into the different product taxonomy areas.
So you can have a very strong product portfolio. the way we make decisions in terms of decision mechanisms, one way, two way doors.
And then last but not least, but I think it's also important in order to have a clear idea of how your users, your customers are consuming your products.
So are you having very clear user engagement and usage tracking elements in place to understand your customers?
Are you instrumenting your technology stack in terms of how you provide services or how your customers are using and adopting your services?
And then on the other spectrum is those customers who are moving towards a SaaS model, which is a bit different flavor, They may be on the cloud, but they want to move towards the SaaS model.
It's also important for them to start instrumenting their internal operations.
And why I say that is because it's important for them to know exactly how their internal products are performing, not for the external customer, but internally.
How long is their uptime? How long is the wait time in certain transactions?
Are the APIs connected fast enough? All those internal KPIs were not before important to a product manager. are now important, especially when you're in the SaaS world, because all those things impact the customer experience.
So I think when we think about product operations, those are the kind of the key things that I think about are the elements I would discuss with the customer to help them evolve the current state.
Next, we hear from Mark Rosenberg, VP of Product Management and Vivian Finney, Principal Product Manager at Workday.
Mark shares how his team treated internal product teams like customers using product ops to remove friction and unlock better delivery and decision-making.
Vivian takes us inside the data challenges of scaling product ops and how she led efforts to create standardization that unlocked strategic insights without stifling autonomy.
When you were looking to get started with all these great ideas, hey, we gotta fix this, we gotta fix that, how did you start to execute around this?
Yep. So we started looking at just some of these things we're talking about, like classifying the problem areas and the things that needed the most attention, that visibility was important.
And there were a number of new leaders and kind of order changes in our office of CFO divisions, which is financial, but also our analytics and our planning and our procurement or spend areas. and getting everybody seeing the, at least in financials, at least getting everybody seeing the problems, seeing that we could go faster, seeing that we could deliver code more safely, we could reduce the risk of bets.
That was a key part of it. And coming back to my initial, just going on a listening tour, and really looking for the most important pains and seeing that people were like, yeah, we on scrum teams, product managers, leading individual teams or products, feeling like we could be faster, we could make a bigger impact, but there's some structural impediments to that.
And we found... we treated our teams like customers.
And I think that's really the key in the product operations book.
One of the success stories that one of your folks you interviewed for the book talked about is just that we've thought about our product managers, those customers, and how do we take the friction out of their day and enable them to deliver better, faster, make better decisions.
So if you... are keeping them front and center and making clear to them the goals.
But by the way, you need to make sure that the things you're deciding are clear and transparent, flowing up and flowing sideways.
They got that and they're like, sign us up.
And that's where some of the tooling that Vivian was critical to doing was naturally consumed.
People were like, thank goodness, this is great.
We love it. We're happy to fill in this thing and not these other six things because this makes our lives easier and we know that leadership is going to be happy too.
Let's go do that. So again, it comes down to seeing where the friction was downward, if you will, again, to the team level, and then also up from above, the visibility to make sure we're aligned to the objectives.
And then these major initiatives, they took off.
It was very easy to get the traction for them.
When you were getting up to speed on all the stuff that you had to take into account at workday and figure out where to start, how did you narrow down the scope, figure out where I can dive in, where I can have the leverage for that?
What did that process look like? Yeah, I think as Mark mentioned earlier, it's really leadership understanding how they can apply resources to make the right decisions because the impact of that is so broad.
And so for me, with the data background, it was immediately about what you mentioned in product operations where the data just becomes immediately stale.
That's a fact. It will be immediately stale if you live in the environment of spreadsheets and you don't have specialized tooling built out around it.
And so for me, the first challenge that I understood that I had to unblock was just create visibility into how they have resources invested and the prioritization that their team understood to be working towards just so that they could stay informed.
I had to do it in a way where we could standardize the process for teams to surface that information and in a way that could scale to be continuously delivered.
As anyone in data knows, it's always fun to try and mix and match data sources.
That's more than half the problem is cleaning the data, getting it together, combining it, understanding what you need to pull from various sources.
So for me, I understood that would be the most impactful thing that I could do just to help surface the information to those who could make the decisions. that would impact so many people in the world.
What kind of solution did you end up with to make that happen?
Hey, product people, I have some very exciting news.
Our new Mastering Product Strategy course is now live on Product Institute.
I've been working on this course for years to help product leaders tackle one of the biggest challenges I see every day, creating product strategies that drive real business results.
If you're ready to level up your strategy skills, head over to productinstitute.com and use code LAUNCH for $200 off at checkout.
Yeah, so ultimately, we started with annual planning, which has since become more of a continuous planning exercise because when you're able to surface that data continuously, leadership can make on-the-go decisions about, we got this major request, can we actually stop this and do that?
And so the first thing that I did was trying to understand, I think you mentioned it in Escaping the Build, but it's about standardizing a hierarchy of describing the work being done And for us, it's interesting because one of the most complex divisions in the company, in my opinion, being new to the app side of it and coming from tools, I definitely understood how complex financials was in comparison to some of our older organizations.
And so for me, the challenge was going to be defining the work and creating the least amount of standardization required to be all speaking the same language because you can't ask people to put data into a system unless there's some standardization.
And at the same time, you have to do it with a change management mindset of helping them understand the value.
Like, why are you asking them to do one more thing in their already busy day?
And if they can understand that it ultimately unlocks this or it ultimately helps leadership give them the resources that they desperately need, there's been... amazing adoption and participation from PMs because they get it and they appreciate it.
And they're able to speak the same language, which is not an easy thing in an org that doesn't have a standard taxonomy, even within our own division, at least we didn't prior to this.
And even as we defined it for financials, it's not the same taxonomy that other colors use.
So being able to create that and standardize it in a way that surface that insight for leadership in a way that they could then telegraph that up to executive levels and describe their investment decisions has been the first major challenge that I tackled.
Vivian, one thing that a lot of people like to push back on with product operations is around this like standardization and process area.
I think there's a lot of holdover from Agile stuff where everybody, oh, process is bad.
Let's not talk about process. Let's not standardize certain things.
Why are you so obsessed about standardization?
Can you tell us a little bit about what your view has been on that since this is literally the problem that you're tackling in a large organization?
Yeah, so it's interesting because the challenge is always pushing standardization within an org that holds tightly to our own autonomy within the company.
So it's an interesting pitch to make that we need to standardize in order to not standardize or be subjected to further top-down mandates or requirements.
So I think communicating the value in that, but I think even you have pointed out in products, that it's about standardizing as little as possible to have the most impact.
And to me and Mark, that generally translates into, what do we have to standardize to this extent where we can then just get out of the way?
How can we get this to the point where we can standardize this a bit, and at least we can standardize a taxonomy or an understanding of how we describe the work being done to get out of their way?
Now, let's hear from Jessica Soroki, Senior Director of Product Operations at Pendo.
Jessica explores how AI is reshaping the product ops landscape and shares her hopes that it accelerates the shift from admin support to strategic powerhouse.
Can you talk a little bit maybe about what you've been observing with the change in product operations and how new tools are coming out and what people are doing to harness them and what that does to actually impact product operations as a team?
Yeah, I think we should like mark the time for when AI got brought up.
But I definitely think that what we are seeing with a lot of our customers, when it comes to the project ops conversation is now it was about how do I utilize Pendo to optimize customer feedback qualitative and quantitatively?
How do I arm my PM to make a data informed decision effectively.
And now it's okay, how do I do that? But how do I also either marry that or bring in AI functionality to really streamline and get rid of some of the heavy tasks a PM can get bogged down with?
And so that's a big trend that we're seeing a lot of.
And of course, naturally, they're saying, what's Pendo doing with AI?
And how can we combine these efforts versus having to manage multiple tools for our product organization?
So that's probably more recent, like even in the last three to six months, that's become a pretty big topic.
How do you think AI is changing the face of product operations?
What do you think it's going to look like in the near-term versus long-term future?
I think it's a really difficult time because it's such an emerging industry still.
And like I said, so many people that we encounter are looking for best practice, are struggling to find a ton of resourcing out there or guidance on how do you do products.
So many of the answers are still, it depends.
It depends on your org and your maturity and all of these things.
And what I've heard directly asked of us many times is, don't you just have a template?
Can't you just... can you just give me this thing that solves my problem for me?
And I think weaving AI into that is honestly just overcomplicating an already messy space for companies who are trying to still figure it out.
So I'm sure it's going to have a big impact, especially with data being so prevalent in the product operations job.
And the more tools and the more AI comes in and tries to optimize our usage of data, I think the more it's going to shift.
I think if anything, it will help prod ops be able to lean away from some of that, I hate to say administrative tasks and like just data digging and allow them to be more strategic because they're not having to go through all of that.
That's my long-term hope. My biggest fear with prod ops is that it will be seen Frankly, a lot like how Scrum Masters were for a long time, which is it can be easily oversimplified into this administrative type of role.
And I think there's just so much more value they can bring.
So my hope is AI helps speed that timeline up to strategic involvement.
Jessica, when you're thinking about the evolution of product operations for the next five years, what it's going to look like in the industry in the future, what are you excited about?
I feel like Pindu would be upset if I didn't say more data, all the data.
I think that there is this whole move, digital transformation, product-led transformations, this idea that any company can be customer-centric and use their product to really drive benefit for their customers is where I hope it continues to go.
And I hope that, like I mentioned earlier, products can be seen as this strategic tool part of that equation and not get lost in some of the administrative stuff.
Where I've seen organizations be successful in being strategic, it is game changing for those, not even just those product works, for that entire company.
So I hope we continue to lean into that.
And I hope that Product ops folks out there continue to fight the good fight because I know it is frustrating sometimes to try to constantly convince folks that what you're doing is good and valuable for them.
But when you can break through, it's still worth it.
Finally, Hugo Froese, head of product operations at OLX.
Hugo talks about creating scalable planning and OKR systems that don't slow teams down.
He shares practical ways to support product leaders without stepping on their autonomy.
One of the great ways I like to approach product operations, it's about how do I make myself seem like I have bigger impact without having to be in every single interaction?
And here it's important, and a lot of people debate whether we're not substituting what product leaders should be doing.
I actually say with the right product leaders, They are partners and they're accountable and they take ownership of ton of the stuff where I can just literally help and help shape it with them.
And I partner with them, but they take it and they take it to their teams.
And the success comes from that. If I do it by myself and I have to be a police, it never works actually.
I just get pushed back. Whereas if they take the ownership, they go in there and they implement it, they make it their own, right?
It's incredible. And that's the results I've seen.
What have been the core tenants or the core areas that you're concentrating on in product ops that you found have given the teams the most value?
For me, one thing I always find in every organization I arrive at is one of the key problems is always planning.
And in bigger enterprise organizations, people argue against this and, oh, how can you do yearly planning?
But we do yearly planning, right? We have a stage at one stage of the year where we have to figure out what is the budget we want to basically allocate for our every gamble experience, everything we want to do next year.
How do we allocate that budget? So this planning has to happen.
But in terms of the organizations trying to turn this as fluid as possible, adaptable and flexible as possible, that's where we see the most value, right?
Because teams think, oh, you have these set timelines and this is how it has to work.
But sometimes it's that simple thing of someone who comes in who's neutral, who's outside and saying, okay, we know we have to deliver this by this date.
Let's actually work backwards rather than saying we have to deliver it by this date, so let's sit a week before and discuss.
No. If you want to be comfortable here, maybe we need to discuss a month or two months before where it's a relaxed conversation, right?
You don't feel the pressure. You have to make a decision now.
And so by this, we start creating the space for people to be flexible, start connecting the dots earlier.
But another thing we did, for example, was with OKRs.
A simple thing was defining... two or three types of OKRs.
And it's like, everybody talks about the outcome OKRs and I get it.
The problem is what we noticed was with teams, they were working on an OKR and then they don't see those results for two or three quarters, right?
And it's always on their roadmap. It's always there sitting there and it's bugging them.
And you turn around and said, okay, let's break this down.
You've got discovery OKRs. So now you can actually map out discovery you're going to be doing.
And next you're going to be doing build OKRs, right?
Because you have to build something that's built around milestones.
And then you have outcome OKRs. And so what happened was, strangely enough, this created a bit of a space for that habit of the, I won't even call it dual track.
It's almost a triple track, right? Which is at any given time, you've got some things that have been doing discovery, some that are being built, and some that are doing launching, right?
And actually outcomes. By this, because what I've seen in organizations is usually, oh, you If you've signed an OKR, that's 100% of your time.
And you're like, no, there's 100 other things that have to happen or else next quarter, we're only going to be, we're going to go back to zero.
And so it was creating this and it created a huge impact.
So one of the big ones is always planning, right?
Another one we found that could bring potential impact usually for the teams is just organizing insights.
And we know what happens, right? Any organization we're talking about, whether it's data, whether it's research, whether it's all these different teams, they're creating tons of content around insights, information, and they create dashboards, they create reports, they create... And you look and you think...
Okay, the amount of time any product team has to figure out where this stuff lives, it's too much of an overload, right?
And okay, take a step back and say, how do we bring this so that the product person can go in there?
And in five minutes, I can find what I need and where it is.
And then next, how do I use that quickly, right?
And so it's about making them more efficient and effective in this.
It's reducing the friction around these things to give them the space to do the work they need to do. being able to actually measure the value on it.
So that's a key part of product operations too.
What do you do to help the measurement side of things, right?
Like we're running these OKRs, we're looking at it, like how do you see product ops and data working together there?
Yeah, it's interesting because I've always touched or at least paid attention to data.
But until I read your book with Denise, I'd never actually deep dived on the concept.
And then I realized something that For me, it also depends on how the structure of the organization is working, right?
So for example, the owners of data are the data teams, right?
And what happens is in some cases, they're doing an incredible job of doing the curation of that data for the teams.
And in that case, I'd probably don't even have to jump in.
They will do anything around that. However, there are many cases where they have tons of data.
They know what to do with that data. there's 500 dashboards, there's tons of people.
So there, what we do is, it's a thing I always tell my team, just remember one thing, our job is to help curate the stuff so that people can make quicker decisions with more confidence.
So we have to find the mechanics to do that.
And sometimes we'll work with a data team to do that.
Sometimes we'll just basically, a simple thing is, we'll create a list of where all this data lives, right?
So you can more easily find it. There's simple things we can do, but it is about trying to connect the people to write the information.
And that's what we try and do. So We won't always create a dashboard or anything like that, but sometimes you need to create an aggregator dashboard because it doesn't exist or something that gives you that top level view or that gives you the correlation between things.
So we try and incentivize that. Everything that you're talking about is so great from a product operations standpoint too, because it's about meeting the company where it's at and it's not reinventing the wheel.
You're like filling the gaps in to figure out what do we need and how do we strategically get this done to help our product managers?
Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast.
We'll be back next week. Make sure you leave any questions for me at dearmelissa.com and I'll be sure to answer them on a future episode.
Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time.
