1. Introduction to Product Operations

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the Product Operations session of the PM3 Product Management course. My name is Marcela, and throughout my career, I’ve focused heavily on B2B enterprise product management. Most of my time was spent as the Head of Product at Cortex, a SaaS data analytics company serving large enterprises in Brazil. I’ve also consulted for other companies, primarily with a B2B focus. I think it’s important to share my background so you can better relate this to your own experiences and consider what might make sense in your company’s context.

Agenda Overview

This session is structured into several parts:

  1. Introduction to Product Operations: For those who aren’t familiar with this concept.
  2. Three Pillars of Product Operations: I’ll provide real-world examples and cases to help you understand how to apply these concepts in your own companies.
  3. When and How to Start: We’ll discuss how to determine if it’s the right time to establish a Product Operations function in your organization.
  4. Measuring Success: We’ll cover how to assess whether your Product Operations efforts are effective.

What is Product Operations?

To kick things off, I want to share an image from a tweet by Drew Falkman where he asks, “Is Product Ops the future of product teams?” Interestingly, the answer options weren’t yes, no, or maybe; instead, they were: “What is Product Ops?” This highlights the confusion around the term, which is why it’s crucial to start with a clear understanding of what Product Operations entails.

A common definition of Product Operations is that it provides tools, data, and processes at scale, creating the necessary foundation to successfully manage products.

To make it easier to visualize, we often compare Product Operations to a football field. The players, goalie, referees, and coach are analogous to the PMs, designers, engineers, and others on the product team. Product Operations ensures that the field is in good condition, that the players have the right uniforms, and that the coach has the necessary data to make decisions during the game. Essentially, Product Ops ensures that the team can score goals as efficiently as possible.

Another way to look at Product Operations is as an intersection between product, engineering, and customer-facing teams such as sales and customer success. This is a powerful concept and one that you’ll see reflected throughout the core pillars of Product Ops, as I’ll explain later.

Key Definitions from Thought Leaders

One of the top global voices in Product Operations is Melissa Perri, founder of Product Labs. She defines Product Operations as creating a data system within the product team to gather the right qualitative and quantitative data from the correct sources and integrate it into processes to build better products. This emphasizes not just collecting data but making sure it’s absorbed and utilized by product teams in a scalable way, which is one of the key challenges of Product Ops.

Blake Samic, Head of Product Operations at Stripe, defines it as the function that builds a bridge between the teams developing the company's technology and those interacting with customers. This definition highlights the critical role of Product Ops in aligning product, engineering, and sales/customer-facing teams.

Product Operations in Growing Organizations

In any organization, a healthy balance for product leaders is to spend 80% of their time focusing on vision, strategy, execution, and communication. They work on defining roadmaps, interviewing customers, collaborating with engineers, and delivering strategy-driven results and growth. The other 20% of their time is typically spent on team development, processes, and improving tools for more efficient work.

However, as companies grow—especially at a rapid pace—this balance can quickly become disrupted. Product leaders may find themselves overwhelmed with operational concerns, such as onboarding new hires, finding tools for data collection, or managing complaints about the lack of actionable data. Instead of focusing on customers and strategy, they become bogged down by administrative tasks. This is where Product Operations comes in.

The Three Pillars of Product Operations

I divide Product Operations into three key pillars:

  1. Voice of the Customer: This pillar ensures that all qualitative data from the customer’s journey is collected, from the moment they become a lead to contract renewal (or even churn). It's about finding the right customers to engage with and gathering their insights.

  2. Product Data: This is typically the quantitative data pillar, where data is collected and insights are generated regarding product performance and usage. The goal is to empower teams with the information they need to make data-driven decisions.

  3. Tools and Processes: This pillar focuses on scaling best practices, tools, and rituals within product teams to optimize workflows and processes. It's about enabling a high-growth organization to maintain efficiency and stay aligned.

These pillars work together to ensure that the product machinery runs smoothly. We’ll dive deeper into each pillar with real-world examples later in this session.

The Clients of Product Operations

It’s important to define who the clients of Product Operations are. In this case, the clients are the people working within product teams—engineers, PMs, designers, and product marketing managers (if they are part of the product team). These individuals have their own primary and secondary clients, such as sales teams, other departments, and of course, the end users of the product.

By considering clients and personas, we can apply the same principles to Product Operations that we do to product management. Our product is providing tools, data, and processes to make product teams more efficient, and we must think about how to best serve these clients.

What Product Operations is NOT

It’s also important to define what Product Operations is not:

Conclusion

Product Operations is a critical function that helps product teams scale and operate efficiently by providing the right tools, data, and processes. By focusing on the voice of the customer, product data, and tools and processes, Product Ops enables teams to stay aligned, iterate faster, and focus on delivering value.