As businesses evolve, product portfolios expand, and shareholders look for greater productivity, the role of product operations grows in importance.
Though less standardized compared to more targeted “ops” functions like DevOps or sales ops, product ops is rapidly gaining recognition as a potentially pivotal element within progressive organizations.
It’s not always clear when to start investing in this function, whether it be training your staff, hiring people, or setting up a whole department, so in this blog post, we’ll look at five signs to watch out for.
But first, an overview of product operations...
What is product operations?
Simply put, product operations or "product ops" is an enablement function that helps teams deliver better products with greater efficiency. Companies implement it in diverse ways, but generally, it serves to bridge gaps between product strategy, execution, and customer alignment using data, tools, best practices, and facilitation support.
What do product operations do?
- Data: Establishing systems to capture and distribute data for those who analyze it to make informed product decisions. For example, user behavior metrics and performance data from DevOps platforms or win/loss interviews from buyers are made easily accessible to product managers.
- Tooling: Implementing and managing tools that support the product lifecycle, from conception through launch and beyond. Tools for tasks such as idea management, road mapping, knowledge management, and development tracking.
- Process: Improving and standardizing processes across product teams to enhance productivity. This can include ways of working like Agile and SAFe.
- Collaboration: Facilitating collaboration between product management, engineering, marketing, sales, and customer support teams. Product ops plays a critical role in integrating insights from DevOps, platform engineering, and service management, which is often overlooked.
- Feedback: Creating and managing feedback loops with customers and internal teams to ensure products meet user needs and facilitate rapid iteration. Product ops synthesizes feedback from all touchpoints, including direct customer input and testing results, connecting the right people for the right conversations.
Recognizing the need for product ops within your organization can be a game-changer, especially if you’re encountering specific challenges that are hindering the potential of your product(s) and related teams.
Now, onto what you came for—five signs to look out for that suggest your organization might benefit from establishing or enhancing a product ops function:
1. “We want to be product-led and data-driven, but the data just isn’t good enough.”
Sound familiar? Product decisions in most industries should be based on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data. Comprehensive analytics, including performance metrics, user engagement data, and testing outcomes, should be standard.
If your organization lacks a structured approach to making data-driven decisions, a product ops function can develop and manage the necessary tools and metrics to support informed decision-making. This includes setting up frameworks for A/B testing, usability testing, and commercial performance monitoring.
2. Your product team is at risk of burnout.
Product people include product managers, product leads, product marketers, data analysts, user researchers, and designers.
All these jobs involve spinning a lot of plates in both supporting products in use by customers and new product development activities. Often, the people in these roles step on each other's toes, and the lines between who does what are blurred.
As soon as you add data gathering and implementing new tools and migrations to the workload, you’re burdening already busy people with more work. A product ops team takes this away as they specialize in it, allowing others to focus on their strengths and core business objectives.
3. “We have so many products but so little bandwidth.”
As your product portfolio expands, scaling efficiently becomes crucial. If you're experiencing issues such as longer deployment cycles, reduced product quality, or difficulty managing multiple product lines, product ops can introduce scalable methodologies and practices.
This role is crucial in standardizing processes across products and ensuring that growth does not compromise operational efficiency or product integrity.
4. Release on demand is out of sync with your CI/CD.
When your ability to release on demand falls out of alignment with your Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) processes, you might try to problem solve in the “DevOps” space, but it's a telltale sign your organization needs to look further upstream.
The misalignment here can be on the “demand” side rather than the “supply” and can slow down your time to market, increase production errors, and create stress across teams.
By improving collaboration between developers and product managers, product ops ensures that products are not only launched efficiently but also align with market demands and business objectives.
5. Product managers can’t write acceptance test-driven user stories.
The ability to iterate products rapidly based on user feedback and testing results is essential for staying competitive. One way this manifests is user stories being written with the acceptance test into the story (acceptance test-driven development, or ATDD for short).
Product ops help here by developing user story templates and evangelizing the benefits of ATDD. Then, by streamlining how user feedback is collected, analyzed, and turned into new stories, the loop from insight to implementation is shortened so that your products evolve quickly and effectively to meet user demands.
Investing in product ops
Investing in a product ops function can give a huge productivity boost to your product development efforts, aligning user feedback, market research, testing, and DevOps practices with your strategic goals.
This role not only enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of your product teams but also drives better outcomes so that your products remain competitive and closely aligned with customer and market needs.
Published: Aug 5, 2024
