Product Ops; the strategic partner
I’ve had first hand experience, with both success and failure, of Product Ops being seen as a true ‘strategic partner’ to product leadership. Through these experiences my approach to any new engagement is to communicate early the value this type of partnership can bring.
That being the value to the customer and the business. What difference are you going to make to the organisation, its customers and how can you impact the business on the bottom line?
A great Chief of Staff Josephine Conneely once told me that the best operations people are those that care deeply about the customer. I think Product Ops can often misunderstand this sentiment — they believe the Product Manager or the product teams to be their customer. They are not, they are our partners.
Product Ops practitioners should be enabling product teams to find customer value and business benefit in the most efficient and effective ways. They should be maximising the performance and impact of product teams, the best way to do that is not at the tactical level, at least it’s not where the focus should be to start.
Customers don’t care which documentation tools you use, they don’t care whether your roadmap uses the now/next/later format, or whether your teams use OKRs or NSMs. That’s not to say that these aren’t important and putting them in place can be a good tactical challenge to take on. It just means that Product Ops should focus, and be given the space to focus, on the most critical parts of how the organisation operates.
The way to approach Product Ops to drive the most impact is to be at the holistic and strategic levels. With this approach, any of the tactical operations work that follows will be more impactful and any efficiency gains will be even more realised.
The areas of focus mentioned above can be viewed as strategic choices. When viewed in this way, the choices in how we can better understand our customers and be more aligned in what the business needs, their implementation and therefore the role of Product Ops becomes immediately more valuable.
Let’s take an example. In one organisation, where I worked in a Product Ops team, we had 15 product teams and 18 different product requirement document templates. At the time it felt like a good tactical challenge for our newly formed team.
We reduced down to one template, one that covered enough of what everyone needed. However, we were satisfying everyone while pleasing no one. It was a huge challenge and the effort and time it took was probably triple what we predicted.
What real difference did that make? The only real change was that Product Managers could now access the template a little quicker. The teams did not suddenly become more efficient (what a surprise!) and certainly were no more effective than previously. Customers would have noticed no change in the value they were looking for, the business felt no change on the bottom line.
When you act like the moth to the flame, you’re destined to burn in the fire. We had been burnt, that came in the form of more small-scale tactical challenges being requested, ones that still made little to no difference to the customer or the business and took up nearly all of our valuable time.
What could have been different if we’d taken a more strategic approach? We would have been asking deeper questions, the right questions.
Questions like why are we even documenting in this way? How is that benefitting our approach to product development? How might we reduce documentation, improve collaboration and get things into customer’s hands quicker or and with more value?
Those are the types of questions we started asking, questions that shifted the mindset of the whole product and tech organisation. Questions that forced strong discussion that moved us from a ‘throw it over the wall’ waterfall mentality, to truly collaborative product teams focused on customer outcomes and aligned to the business.
Being a strategic partner to a cross-functional product leadership team that is accountable for the overall business success of the products being built requires capabilities brought through varied learned experiences.
The best Product Ops practitioners I’ve met have a broad set of experiences. They’ve come from different technical backgrounds, they understand what ‘good’ product development looks like. They can operate, and solve problems, at the holistic, strategic and tactical levels. They have the mentality to not only make sense of what is happening around them but the ability to take action to make change happen.
Chris Compston, a Product Ops Coach & Consultant and creator of the Lean Capability Matrix — maximising the performance and impact of product teams. He has over a decade working in technology organisations. Enabling teams to build better products for their customers and the business.
