Core Pillars of Product Operations

Building and scaling a product operations function is important for driving growth and efficiency. The first step in building a robust product operations function is understanding the three core pillars: Business and Data Insights, Customer and Market Insights, and Process and Practices. Each of these pillars plays a vital role in creating a streamlined, efficient product operations team. 1. Business and Data Insights Automating data collection and analysis here ensures your team can move quickly. When internal data is accessible and up-to-date, product teams have the insight needed to make strategic decisions without wasting time on manual reporting. This allows them to focus more on actions that drive outcomes rather than wrangling data. 2. Customer and Market Insights Staying close to customers and the market is key. With automated feedback loops like surveys, sentiment analysis, and market research platforms, product teams can gather real-time insights that directly influence product direction. These insights keep teams aligned with customer needs and on top of market shifts, allowing them to be proactive rather than reactive. 3. Process and Practices Standardized workflows ensure everyone on the team is aligned and focused. Automation can help scale these workflows by reducing repetitive tasks and reinforcing best practices. The goal is to free up your team’s time for high-impact work while maintaining consistency across projects and teams. It's important to start small and iterate. Begin by automating the most time-consuming and repetitive tasks, then gradually expand to more complex processes. This approach allows for quick wins and demonstrates the value of automation to stakeholders, paving the way for broader adoption. What tasks have you automated in your product operations, and what impact have you seen? Share your experiences! #productoperations #automation #productmanagement #datadriven

“Build it and they will come” has never worked. Seasoned product leaders know better—they bet on Product Ops. Remember the last time an enterprise customer was upset because your new feature broke their workflow? Or when a product launch got stuck because customer support wasn’t aligned? In the best product organizations, Product Ops is crucial for getting the most out of every product initiative. If you don’t have a Product Ops function yet, here’s why you should: 1. Scale your product managers When product managers don't have to focus on improving processes, they can spend more time on strategic work––speaking with top customers, building partnerships, evaluating new business opportunities, driving cross-functional alignment, etc. 2. Build Better Products Product Ops creates Voice of Customer (VoC) processes, funneling real-world insights to your product teams for more informed decision-making. 3. Increase Product Impact Done right, Product Ops partners with both business and technology leaders to design processes that maximize growth. Product development lifecycle processes are just one example. 4. Ship Faster By establishing streamlined systems and workflows, Product Ops enables faster alignment and decision-making—so you can bring more products to market, sooner. Bottom Line: If you want to avoid miscommunication, stalled releases, and underutilized features, it’s time to double down on Product Ops. What’s been your experience? Let me know in the comments! #productoperations #productmanagement

Product operations is the missing link in customer success. Last week, Sara and I had a call with the person responsible for Product Management Excellence at a large, mature SaaS company. This person oversees a four-pillar organization: 1/ design & ux research Enable product teams to conduct *qualitative* user and market insights via customer discovery and ongoing testing. 2/ product analytics Enable product teams to conduct quantitative (data-driven) analysis through product analytics. 3/ pm processes and practices Enablement and skill-building for the entire product organization. 4/ communications & help In-app customer communications, help documentation, and knowledge base. Closely supports the needs of customer-facing parts of the organization like support, services, and customer success. They call it Product Management Excellence, which i love. And I love how comprehensive their remit is, to include all customer facing communications and help / enablement (many product dev shops stop woefully short of where they should on enablement IMO). It's akin to what many, including Marty Cagan, Melissa Perri, and my friend Jessica Soroky, might call product operations. Product managers are responsible for delivering valuable products to market. The root of modern customer success is *product success.* Product operations, by this definition, is foundational to customers success. This is one definition. How does your organization define product ops, and how does it relate to customer success ops, sales ops, and other operations and insights teams in the business?