Four Steps to a Product Operations Strategy
“Product Ops is a strategic role”
If you’ve ever listened to one of my podcast appearances it’s highly likely you’ve heard me say this before.
To me, this is self-explanatory. But for a huge number of people it isn’t.
And I understand that - if you view Product Ops as nothing more than assistants to PMs, I’d be confused, too. If this is you I’d strongly encourage you to re-evaluate your view of Product Operations - because until you understand what this pivotal role can really do for your organisation, you’ll never get the full benefit of it.
So back to my statement: Product Ops is a strategic role. What do I mean by that?
Product Operations needs to be done deliberately - or you will fail.
Most often, a Product Ops role or department is created because things are on fire, and there’s nothing terribly wrong with that. The organisation identified an acute problem, and the solution hypothesis is that a Product Operations professional will help alleviate those pains.
And there’s also nothing wrong with the fact that most of us will inevitably spend the majority of our time in a new role addressing these acute pains - fighting the fires.
However, this is not a long term solution. And it’s not the way to elevate your organisation to product excellence.
In Product Management we have vision, we have strategy, we have definitions of success. Product Operations cannot be any different.
If you’re a Product Operations Manager today, and you spend the majority of your time fighting fires let me tell you right now: You are wasting your time. And what’s worse: You will never be able to achieve the things you might be able to achieve with a solid strategy.
If you’re a seasoned Product professional none of the following things will be new to you - and that’s the point. At its core, Product Operations is nothing more than applying Product Management practices to the organisation as a whole.
But if you are struggling to get out of fire fighting mode and into a strategic mindset, I hope the following tips will help you.
Note that you’ll quickly realise that you won’t be able to do this on your own. That is deliberate. For Product Ops to truly operate at the level in which it will have the most impact, the organisation needs to agree on the most valuable skills and capabilities of its people.
Step 1: Understanding where the organisation wants to be
This is the most crucial step of any Product Ops engagement, and sadly one that is often overlooked.
Ideally this conversation should’ve happened before you were hired or the department created, but more often than not that’s wishful thinking. So it’s up to you to a) recognise when this conversation needs to happen, and b) to facilitate it.
A) Recognising when the conversation needs to happen: This depends on your organisation’s circumstances and the amount of time it’s advisable to stay in fire fighting mode. In my experience, a new Product Ops hire will likely spend the first three months understanding the organisation and delivering quick wins. Depending on how complex an organisation you join this might take you longer, but at the six-month mark you should have a fully formed Product Ops strategy for the coming year.
B) Facilitating the conversation: This is your first opportunity to really meaningfully engage with your product leadership partners, and it’s the most important conversation you’ll have in your onboarding phase. Ideally you’ll want to do this with the most senior Product person in your company, assuming you report to them. If you don’t report to them, do this exercise with the senior Product person you report to.
If you don’t report to a Product person, or if the person you report to isn’t a senior Product leader, you might not be empowered to become a strategic Product Operations partner, and you might need to seriously consider how you can get the right people in the room with you.
Your role in this conversation is that of an impartial facilitator. You are there to guide the conversation, ask follow-up questions, clarify, and highlight possible inconsistencies or contradictions. It is not your job to set the strategic direction of the Product Management department, however as you inevitably have your own personal preferences and experience it’s fine to give your opinion when asked.
In order to kickstart your conversation, here are some questions you might want to start with:
As a Product organisation, where do we want to be in 3-5 years?
As a Product organisation, what do we want to be known for?
As a Product organisation, what ways of working do we want to pride ourselves on?
As a Product organisation, what do we want our team members to do better than anyone else?
Refrain from accepting generic answers like ‘customer centricity’ and ‘engineering excellence’ and instead try to define together what those terms might look like concretely. Are we striving to speak to customers every week? Are we targeting near-zero bugs? Do we want to be known for our commitment to open source? Will we build the best Product team in France? In Europe? In the world?
Step 2: Understanding the core competencies needed to get there
Now that you’ve co-defined and agreed upon the Product organisation’s ambitions, you need to ask yourself: What kind of person with what kind of skills is needed to get there? Focus on competencies and skills like high data literacy, rapid prototyping, and industry-specific knowledge as well as traits such as comfort in ambiguity, low ego, and complex problem solving. You might be able to gain some inspiration for these possible skills and traits from your Product Management career ladder (if one indeed exists and is fleshed out enough), but do work together to think outside the box and identify skills your organisation doesn’t yet have.
Keep in mind that this exercise isn’t about creating an ideal employee persona that can do everything perfectly - and make sure your Product leaders understand that this isn’t a hiring plan, because this unicorn PM doesn’t actually exist. This exercise is solely about surfacing the skills and traits needed to fulfil the organisation’s ambitions, and the reality is that your ideal Product team will be made up of many competent, smart, and capable individuals all with their own strengths and weaknesses. Remember: The goal isn’t to find the needle-in-the-haystack PM that can do it all, the goal is to have a balanced organisation that has the necessary skills across the board to deliver excellent product work.
If you do feel like you’re starting to build a wishlist together, get back to the ambitions you’ve identified in the previous step and try to map out exactly which skills and traits relate to them. Chances are, not all of them are as relevant as they seemed in conversation.
Step 3: Understanding the difference between your current core competencies and your desired core competencies
This isn’t something you can do in one workshop or indeed in one afternoon, as it requires input from many different places. Your goal is to understand what the organisation is currently good at, what it’s mediocre at, and what it’s failing at, as well as which skills and traits are currently present but not necessarily needed, and which are missing entirely.
To discover this, there are three sources of information you should consider:
The opinion of your PMs (at all levels): You can get this information in two ways: Sending out a survey (good for high volume, but less personal and less able to follow-up), and conducting user interviews (more time-intensive, but will yield more nuanced answers). Try to keep your questions generic and open-ended - we’re not conducting a performance review, nor do we want to encourage blame or finger-pointing. Ask them what they think the Product organisation is currently good at, and what it’s bad at and why. Your Product Managers are your most valuable source of information as they are the people doing the actual work, and most often they’re most aware of the issues at hand.
The opinion of the rest of the Product organisation: Oftentimes we aren’t able to see how our behaviours or actions influence others, and it’s no different in Product Management. This is why it’s important to speak to the people who most closely work with your Product Managers to better understand the state of collaboration at your organisation. The format can be the same as the above, although I’d wager that it’s even more important here to conduct face-to-face interviews rather than sending out a survey, as it will be easier for you to dig into the details. Again, do make sure that this doesn’t become a therapy session or an opportunity to rant off the record - keep your participants on topic and impartial.
The opinion of your commercial teams or the opinion of your executive team: This is where things get really interesting, because depending on your audience, their understanding of Product Management, and their previous experience with the Product organisation you might get incredibly valuable and insightful comments or you might get a wishlist of things that should be working better - which might be valuable in its own right, but is not what we’re currently going for.
I strongly suggest taking a heavily curated approach to this step, and only speaking to people who have the appropriate context and visibility. Work together with the Product leaders from the first two steps to identify suitable interview candidates, but do make sure you leave the ‘Product bubble’. Ideally you’ll want to speak to someone who isn’t in Product & Tech, but either has visibility into its inner workings, is a major stakeholder, or who has past product experience. These are the people who will give you the most meaningful insights.
A note on step 3: The information you’ll be working with is subjective by nature, and people’s own personal experiences and preferences will heavily colour the answers they will give you. It’s your job to find commonalities and trends in those answers, and to ensure you gain an objective overview of the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses. Don’t put pressure on yourself to perfectly understand your new organisation the first time round - as you learn more about your organisation, your fellow product teams, and how they operate you will inevitably continuously adapt and update your approach.
Step 4: Understanding the next immediate steps
So, you’ve worked together with senior Product leadership to define the Product organisation’s ambitions, and to identify the core skills and traits necessary to fulfil those ambitions. You’ve also gained a good understanding of your organisation’s current skills and traits, and the difference between those and the ones necessary for product management excellence (as you have defined it).
Now it’s finally time to put what you’ve learned into action - and craft your Product Operations roadmap for the coming year.
Your Product Ops roadmap should ideally consist of no more than three longer-term initiatives taking a maximum of 50% of your time in turn, smaller short-term initiatives, and a 15-20% buffer for ad-hoc projects and requests (because random fires will almost always appear). It’s completely fine for your roadmap to become less granular the further into the future you look - in fact, I encourage you to be as flexible as possible. However, your work so far should have surfaced important larger work items without which you will not be able to fulfil your Product organisation’s ambitions. These work items might include setting up a learning academy, migrating the organisation to a new project management tool, or introducing new ways of working that affect a large number of people - the kind of work that is impossible to do well if you’re in constant firefighting mode.
Once you have identified the immediate levers to pull you need to socialise your Product Operations strategy and roadmap with your senior leadership to maintain transparency and get buy-in. What you want to strive for is a concrete yet flexible action plan for the coming year that you all agree with and commit to. This might take a few iterations, but the more you and your Product leadership can see eye-to-eye and get on the same page, the easier it will be for them to advocate for you when you inevitably run into roadblocks down the line - and for you to use your roadmap as a tool to defend the most important things you should be working on.
To summarise
Great Product Operations work is strategic, not reactive. And great Product Operations work has the power to meaningfully transform how Product organisations operate, taking them from competitors to market leaders. But strategic Product Operations is not an accident - it needs to be crafted. To stop wasting your (and your organisation’s!) time, go through the following steps:
Understanding where the organisation wants to be
Understanding the core competencies needed to get there
Understanding the difference between your current core competencies and your desired core competencies
Understanding the next immediate steps
Great Product Operations isn’t easy - just as great Product Management isn’t. But I hope that by laying out each step in turn, I’ve helped you gain the clarity you need to become a more strategic operational leader, and for you to take your organisation to the next level - just like any good Product Ops manager should do.
Is there a particular topic or area you’d like me to focus on next? Get in touch and let me know!
And if you’ve enjoyed this article, feel free to buy me a coffee.
Thank you for reading, and until next time
Antonia
