As with new roles in any company, a big question is often asked:
What are you here to do?
This is especially true when new roles blur lines with existing ones. With Product Ops being newer as a role in the tech industry, I often get the same questions when chatting with customers or Product Leaders who want to bring the role into their companies. They center around what makes the role different from Product Managers, Product Marketing, and Program/Project Managers. There may be one or two more I’m missing out, but I can assure you I don’t ever get asked what the difference is between Product Ops and Designers or Engineers, thankfully.
In this post, I’ll focus on the Product Ops Manager and the Product Manager. I’ll detail a bit of what I’m seeing across companies who have embraced the Product Ops role over the last few years.
First, what brought about this role? I’ve heard many answers laddering up to a few themes. The two that stick out the most are the need for transparency, and the need for a strong system that empowers the PM to set and achieve KPIs and contribute to business goals.
CPOs and Heads of Product are now responsible for growing the business as much as the rest of their partners across their companies. And, it’s up to the PM to help these leaders set and achieve business goals. In a world where we are tasked with so much, and are surrounded by more competition, noise, and constant change, how can we expect the PM to focus on business goals and not provide a strong system for them to thrive in? Read more about this from my article on Product Craft, and learn about the evolution of Product Management to help solidify the why for Product Ops. If you don’t feel like it today, here’s my short spiel:
Product Ops Managers and Teams focus on helping the entire product team achieve both product and business goals. They put the PM front and center as their core partner, and create transparency and clarity for all other partners across the organization, keeping an eye on the needs of the business at all times.
On to responsibilities and the how roles are working together.
Some consistencies I’m seeing in good Product Operations Managers are below. Note this is not to say every one of these are focus areas of any single individual. The maturity and the needs of the business often determine the focus areas of the Product Ops Manager. Some great examples I’ve seen are where they:
Focus on designing and managing effective Voice of Customer programs that include cross-functional stakeholders. The inputs from VoC programs should feed into routine or ongoing planning and roadmap processes. Think of all the inputs from many channels where customers provide feedback. Product Operations teams are finding creative ways to manage the mess and turn it into sense while the PM focuses on customers, their teams, and product & business goals.
Amplify the voice of the PM, and the value of their product/areas to stakeholders and in-turn customers. What this looks like for some companies is the Product Ops manager being an SME that internal teams can go to with questions and to learn more as the PM continues to focus on major areas above. Some companies are embracing the Product Ops partner as a strong input and component in the go-to-market process, focusing on more release strategy and technical and hands-on education and enablement. This is to ensure multiple points of view are taken into consideration, and there is alignment. My advice in this area: over-communicate.
Create standards for their product and drive best practices for customers to learn from.
Partner closely with Product Managers and Leadership to establish norms and systems for KPI and goal setting, and to measure the success of the product. This could look like dashboards, standard usage, adoption and retention reports, and NPS & other sentiment survey management.
Work on ongoing adoption and usage campaigns that help the PM hit their broader product goals, ultimately contributing to business goals. How often have we seen PMs push value out, focus on it for a bit, and then need to move on to the next valuable item? Having a partner to keep an eye on previously released value is something that’s heavily embraced with this role. I’ve seen some companies embrace the Product Ops manager in this strategic manner and they often end up working more cross-functionally to align all necessary parties (marketing, success, gym) to various activities that contribute to adoption and retention.
Establish a strong system for product planning and status reporting on product/engineering progress towards major goals. This is more prevalent in companies that do not have Program Management/PMO functions. We’ll likely get into the differences in PMO and Product Ops one day, but a big question I get asked is whether PMO fall under Product Ops. I’m seeing some cases where they do, and some cases where they’re separate. What is most important is someone taking ownership of this and making sure it does not become heavy or chaotic for the PM, and routinely checking in to make adjustments as companies mature.
At the end of the day, I always told my team one thing: we want to stand up whatever process or system is needed, and get out of the way so we can focus on driving more strategic value. This is a critical note I want Product Ops managers to remember and take away from this piece.
Strong Product Managers:
Spend time with customers. Quality time, where they’re not fire-fighting, or doing repeat demos. They focus on deeply understanding user pain, first-hand. This helps them identify opportunities to achieve many business goals including contributing to customer retention and customer acquisition, alongside their day-to-day mandate to drive delight and solve problems with the product.
Work with partners in Marketing, Product Ops, and Revenue to support hypotheses and add to their data set around the pain. Equally important is evidence that disputes their hunches and hypotheses. This is where a good Voice of Customer program comes into play from the Product Ops Manager.
Motivate their UX and engineering teams to design and build an experience that drives delight and tackles that user pain.
Prove value as it relates to what they’ve brought to life. Today this looks like increase in usage and/or signups, increased/stable NPS, reduced time to value, contribution towards retention and acquisition, and reduction in risk, among many other goals. This is a key area of partnership with the Product Ops manager as we’re seeing the role establish those systems and norms for measuring success across Product Teams.
It’s very important in the early days of establishing this role to remember two things when it comes to confusion and questions:
Keep an open mind and have honest conversations. In my earliest days at my current company, the lines blurred the most with PMM. But we always focused on who our core customer was to help us get to clarity. PMM focused on sales and external customer engagement, while Product Ops focused on PMs, internal success & technical teams, and (yes) PMM. It helped us identify activities and ownership very quickly.
Nothing is set in stone. Product Management itself is a work in progress. We are here because we as Product people needed to make things better, but we don’t have all the answers. We know there are problems to solve. We know our core customer. We know we have to stay iterative.
In the end, this is all about progress. We know we can’t operate the way we used to in Product, so building and normalizing this new thing called Product Ops will take time and more than a single point of view. Just make sure to row in the same direction!