Building great products is hard. It’s even harder when product managers and engineers are bogged down with work that distracts them from their highest leverage activities of identifying problems and building products people want to use to solve those problems.

To unburden their teams, companies like Facebook, Google, and others have turned to product operations, whose job is to help product teams achieve better outcomes. However, product operations as a function is very much in its infancy, and so few resources exist about the role.

This article attempts to fill some of these gaps by providing an overview of product operations, the value it can add to your product organization, and some tips for establishing the function.

What Is Product Operations?

At its core, product operations enables product teams to achieve better outcomes. In practice, that means creating quality, operational, and organizational communication programs that help product teams spend more time on their highest leverage activities like creating products and delivering value to the business. Below is an overview of these pillars and the key tasks associated with them.

Quality

Most product teams rather spend their time creating new features and products, not slowing down to fix what’s broken. But fixing broken experiences is important. So the question becomes, how can we reduce the time it takes engineers to fix issues? This is where product operations can help.

Most of the time engineers spend on fixing issues is spent on figuring out what is broken. In other words, issue identification and investigation. Product operations plays a key role here, analyzing user issues and designing processes to prevent bad experiences. This enables engineers to quickly resolve errors and continue with their highest leverage activities.

Key Tasks

• User issues reports. Identify, investigate, prioritize, and publish analyses on user issues to drive resolution.
• Product health tracking. Identify key quality metrics and create dashboards to track real-time product health.
• Bug triage. Create processes for intaking and triaging bugs; establish feature ownership to speed resolution.
• Bug Service Level Agreement (SLA). Implement an SLA for bug resolution based on severity; enforce compliance to ensure user issues are addressed.
• Product audits. Conduct product parity audits across platforms to identify missing features; conduct log audits to identify areas where you can add logging to make it easier to fix bugs.
• Dogfooding. Create programs to test new features, document issues, and track their resolution leading up to launch.
• Bug bashes. Host large-scale events aimed at burning down the quality backlogs.
• Quality alerts. Implement alerts for anomalies and SEVs to catch issues before they spiral out of control.

Strategy & Operations

Strategic alignment becomes more difficult (and important) as organizations scale. As your organization grows, you need to have processes to ensure everyone is rowing in the same direction.

Product operations can help here by creating processes for strategic planning, goal-setting, and prioritization, as well as standards for project management and tracking across product teams. The function can also add value by capturing and tracking measures of success, and publishing updates.

Key Tasks

• Goal planning. Create frameworks for aligning company, org, team, and individual goals.
• Measures of success. Identify measures of success, create dashboards for tracking, and report on progress to ensure teams know whether or not they’re hitting the mark.
• Prioritization. Create prioritization frameworks based on set criteria that aligns with the organization’s strategy.
• Project management. Implement project management software and establish standards for tracking and reporting on progress across teams.

Organizational Communication

Facebook’s head of AR/VR, Andrew Bosworth, has said that “Communication is the job.” I couldn’t agree more. However, effective communication takes a lot of time. It’s not uncommon to hear product managers lament about spending more time publishing updates than creating products.

While product operations cannot, and should not, erase the need for product managers to effectively communicate with their teams, the function can boost communication by establishing processes for cross-team communication and knowledge-sharing.

Key Tasks

• Communication channels. Establish Slack channels, team meetings, shared drives, and email lists.
• Communication norms. Create standard operating procedures for routing information through communication channels (e.g., feature changes must be agreed upon in person at the weekly meeting, product roadmaps should be uploaded into the team shared drive, etc.)
• Knowledge bases. Create wikis and gather relevant information to capture tribal knowledge.
• Communication standardization. Create templates for status updates and quarterly reviews.
• Publish updates. Compile raw inputs and publish updates.

Product Operations Roles and Competencies

Below is a list of common product operations roles. Before diving into them, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, not every organization will have (or need) all of these roles. Secondly, aim to have a single point of contact for each product team who can provide support at each stage of the development lifecycle. The reason for this is you want your embedded personnel to know the product inside and out, and this usually requires knowing what issues arise at each phase of development.

Roles

Product Operations Director. This role is responsible for establishing the strategic direction for the product operations function within a company. This includes identifying what the organization aims to do and how it will execute, as well as designing the organization’s structure to meet the product org’s needs. The Product Operations Director usually reports to the Chief Product Officer or head of product and manages Product Operations Managers.

Product Operations Managers (POM). The responsibilities of this role vary. At some companies, it is strictly a people manager position that manages the individual contributors embedded within product teams. At other companies, POMs are individual contributors who are responsible for core product operations duties like surfacing and investigating user issues, establishing quality programs, and implementing processes to drive efficiencies within the product org.

Product Specialists (PS). This role is focused on surfacing, investigating, and recommending solutions for user issues. PSs produce top issue reports to identify user pain points, leveraging internal and external data.

Product Development Specialist (PDS). Where PSs are focused on external user issues, PDSs are focused on resolving issues before products are launched. They establish bug triage flows and dogfooding programs to prevent shipping bad experiences.

Product Reliability Specialist (PRS). PRSs focus on overall product health, identifying health metrics and tracking mechanisms (dashboards and alerts) to assess real-time product health. They create alerts to catch SEVs and anomalies and create programs to drive them down.

Product Data Analysts. This function is responsible for establishing data pipelines to gather user issues and machine learning models to quickly identify and root cause top issues at scale.

Product Operations Engineers. Broadly speaking, this role is responsible for creating custom tools for executing the duties of the product operations function.

Competencies

At a minimum, product operations team members must come to the table with strong data analysis and program management skills. The others, while important, are much easier to teach on the job.

• Data analysis. Intermediate-to-advanced knowledge of SQL; experience with data visualization tools (Looker, Power BI, Tableau); knowledge of applied statistics.
• Program management. Ability to identify requirements, dependencies, and priorities; experience building roadmaps and tracking progress.
• Strategy. Knowledge of strategic frameworks and how to implement them; ability to align organizational priorities across echelons.
• Communication skills. Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Ability to communicate succinctly and adjust communication style based on audience.
• Problem solving. Ability to understand a situation, identify and root cause problems, generate and weigh solutions, and identify potential risks.
• Cross functional collaboration. Experience leading through influence instead of authority; ability to communicate and empathize with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Product knowledge. An understanding of the product development lifecycle from product discovery, creation, launch, and iteration.

Do I Need Product Operations?

Product operations is a role that becomes more relevant as organizations scale. This is because the function tackles many of the issues companies struggle with as they grow, such as poor communication and alignment. Earlier stage companies are unlikely to benefit as much from the function, since product managers can usually cover down, and start-ups’ limited resources are better spent on engineering.

If your organization is struggling with the issues below, it may benefit from establishing a product operations capability.

• Product teams are spending a disproportionate amount of time identifying and investigating user issues, which is hindering our ability to deliver value to users.
• We’re shipping lower quality experiences and are seeing an uptick in regressions and SEVs.
• The amount of time product teams spend communicating their progress is detracting from their core work of building products.
• Product teams are siloed, with little-to-no cross-team communication. It’s unclear who is working on what and how the pieces fit together.
• The goals and priorities of my product org are disjointed. We lack a common framework for measuring and tracking goals, priorities, and work across teams.
• My product team and others across the org consistently miss deadlines and are often caught off-guard by changing priorities.
• It seems like our product teams are constantly re-creating the wheel; they lack standardization that could enable them to focus more of their time on high-value work.

Best Practices for Implementation

There is no one right way to establish a product operations capability. Generally speaking, how the function looks at your company should depend on the needs of your organization and the problems you need it to solve. Below are some guiding principles for helping you do that.

Embed product operations in product and engineering. By this, I don’t just mean the function should be attached to product teams; it must be owned and administratively managed by the product and engineering org — not the business or operations orgs. The reason for this is that it’s difficult to serve the priorities of two different orgs at the same time. Simply put, if you want product operations to solve problems within product and engineering, place the function within product and engineering.

Don’t create solutions in search of problems. Start by identifying what problems your organization is facing. Then, look at the core competencies of product operations and identify which ones would help solve your problems. Implement the narrowest set of solutions to avoid unnecessary overhead.

Don’t create structure for structure’s sake. Every framework, process, and initiative should be aimed at solving a problem and serving the product and engineering org. Too often, operations mistakes motion for progress, assessing their value through outputs instead of outcomes (more on this below). Don’t do this. Be intentional.

Focus on outcomes, not outputs. You need quantifiable measures to determine whether product operation is delivering value to your business. These measures should be focused on outcomes, not outputs. For example, say product operations identified 100 bugs and got engineering to fix them. That sounds like a lot, but so what? Did those fixes lead to outcomes the business cares about such as upticks in revenue, engagement, or conversion? Did the investigative work save engineering hours? If so, how many, and what did engineering do with those hours? Those are things you should care about.

Start small. Don’t try to implement all three product operations pillars at once, unless you’re a large organization and have the resources to build a fully staffed product operations team. Even then, it’s best to focus on one pillar, such as Quality or Organizational Communication, and then build out from there, measuring performance along the way and making adjustments to ensure the function is delivering its intended value.

Build in flexibility. While there are some corollaries between the two, building software is not the same as traditional manufacturing, where most of today’s operational principles originate. When rigid manufacturing principles and standardization protocols are applied in creative environments (like software development), they can stifle progress. Accordingly, you need to balance the need for structure and standardization with the even more important need to remain flexible.

Conclusion

Product operations is a key enabler for product teams. It can help teams ship higher quality products faster and establish processes to improve strategic alignment and communication. With more companies adopting the role, it is likely we will see product operations become a more prominent member of the product team landscape. If implemented in a focused manner and aimed at solving specific problems, product operations can unlock the full potential of your product organization.

Considering establishing a product operations capability? I’d love to hear about how you’re approaching it and share best practices to help you along the way. Reach out to me at blake.s.bassett@gmail.com.