Todd Olson
More posts from Todd Olson
In today’s digital economy, you can tell a lot about a company by looking at how well they leverage their product.
If you’re a forward-thinking business, your product can’t only be the means by which you deliver services and value to customers (although it certainly has to be that). With the rise of the product-led movement, your product is now at the center of all your business functions. It’s a sales tool. It’s a marketing channel. It’s a support desk.
A product-led approach has both empowered product teams and required them to collaborate better with other departments. This can be difficult to accomplish smoothly, since the areas in which much of that collaboration needs to happen have traditionally operated in silos.
Luckily, there’s a way forward, and it involves embracing a new function that can serve as the convener and organizer in a product-led organization. Called product operations (often product ops for short), this function is becoming prevalent among the most forward-thinking companies.
A new role for a new business structure
Typically part of the product team, product ops sits at the intersection of product, engineering and customer success.
This function helps drive business outcomes for product by building non-tangible features and value into the product, as well as improving processes, alignment and communication around the product. It’s similar to how sales and marketing ops help their departments. It’s a critical function for any company that wants to make its product the “center of the wheel.”
Think about the ways a product-led approach fundamentally transforms the customer experience — the self-guided tours, free trials and freemium versions that companies offer. They’ve made it so the software does the talking more than the sales rep. Customers and prospects can now demonstrate a product’s value to themselves.
Or from a marketing perspective, consider how product analytics capabilities give teams unprecedented insight into the best cross-selling and upselling opportunities for customers. In countless ways, being product-led revolutionizes how companies and customers engage with one another.
All these and other innovations have made the product the nexus of collaboration among departments. With this come great opportunities, but also new challenges and complexities, especially around collaboration. Gone are the days when departments could work in isolation from one another and assume any problems stemming from lack of communication can be fixed down the line.
With so much on the line, departments need to work in tandem with one another and continually communicate to optimize goals and execution.
Helping all departments speak the same language
If a product ops team has one superpower, it’s communication. They want to engage with the greater product team and their cross-departmental collaborators while building trust, being flexible and letting data drive decisions.
Product ops typically starts off by meeting with key stakeholders across departments to get a better sense of their workflows and goals, as well as frustrations and pain points. In the process, they will likely identify inefficiencies as well as communication gaps and begin to facilitate greater understanding among teams.
Once this discovery phase is complete, they can spotlight the most pressing items or problems and determine what each department needs to do to help solve them. Maybe the sales team is voicing complaints about a lack of product updates when that’s not in fact the case. Or the product team is confused about marketing’s lack of promotion of a new feature.
Whatever the problem, the first step to remedying it will involve communication clarifying the nature of the issue. This could come in the form of a companywide forum or a sit-down between two or more departments to align on next steps. By facilitating this communication, product ops builds alignment around both the specifics of the problem and how to fix it.
Freeing up PMs to do what they do best
Another way product ops creates alignment is by helping the product team decide what work to prioritize. It does this in large part by overseeing and triaging product feedback, both from customers and from across the business.
With its cross-departmental connections, product ops is in a prime position to manage this feedback and help the product team decide which requests to work on and which to either set aside for the time being or pass over entirely.
It does so by operationalizing and managing stakeholder-related processes and tasks around the product manager (PM). Typical focus areas include beta and release management, voice of the customer (VOC) programs, managing and optimizing the product tool stack and managing whether and to whom to escalate key issues and problems.
By working to help company departments and teams solve these internal pain points related to alignment and product delivery, the product ops team is also allowing their PM counterparts to focus on what matters most: Solving customer pain points around the product and understanding customer wants and needs to guide new development and updates.
For a long time, PMs had grown accustomed to taking on responsibility for all things product, focusing on peripheral issues like sales enablement and VOC programs. This created both too big of a burden for PMs to deal with alone and a bottleneck for everyone else involved in collaboration. With product ops to take those functions off their plate, PMs are in a better position to do what they do best and make sure the product is on a path to continually satisfy and delight customers.
The support PMs receive from product ops translates to happier and more satisfied employees in the PM role. In Pendo’s 2021 State of Product Leadership survey, we asked PMs to give their net promoter score (NPS) for their job.
In other words, we asked them to say how likely they were to recommend their career path to a colleague. PMs who had a product ops team to support them had an NPS that was slightly above 20 (favorable). In contrast, PMs whose departments had not yet hired a product ops person or team had an average NPS just under -20.
What this shows is that these PMs have felt the pain associated with not having a product ops team. They’re looking for a solution, and it can’t come fast enough.
Product ops makes you product-led
As product ops continues to grow in visibility and popularity across tech companies, it’s attracting a slew of talented individuals pivoting from different roles. Product managers, customer and technical success managers, marketers, even data scientists and management consultants — individuals are pivoting from these and other roles to product ops because they understand it’s a meaningful role that’s crucial to forward-thinking companies’ success.
At each stage of the customer journey — from trial and purchase through onboarding and expansion — product-led companies are putting their product at the center of everything they do. Through its important work helping internal teams foster communication, collaboration and execution, product ops is key to the optimization of that customer experience as well as the collaboration of different departmental teams working together to build something great.
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