How to scale your Product team with Product Ops
How to scale your Product team with Product Ops
Scaling product teams is not easy.
As your product team grows, it can become bogged down by inefficiencies and a lack of clear direction. This is where product ops can step in and become a strategic partner, helping your team scale effectively.
The Problem with Reactive Product Ops
There are a lot of shadow ops activities in a product organization.
Many product teams and product ops teams start by focusing on small, tactical changes. While streamlining documentation or improving collaboration might seem helpful, these efforts often fail to deliver lasting value. A reactive approach can leave product managers still feeling overwhelmed and frustrated.
The Shift to Strategic Partnership
To become a strategic partner, Product Ops needs to focus on the bigger picture. This means understanding the product vision, company goals, and the needs of your customers. By asking better questions and focusing on initiatives that deliver customer value, product ops can truly empower product managers. You impact product culture in a positive way.
Building Your Product Ops Strategy Stack
A strong foundation for product ops is built on a well-defined product ops strategy stack. This framework mirrors the product strategy stack, with five key elements:
Vision: Define the product culture you're aiming to build. What does great product management look like at your company?
Department Strategy: Align your product ops strategy with the overall product strategy. How can product ops support the product roadmap and goals?
Product Ops Strategy: This is the core of your product ops stack. How will you achieve your vision? This will involve defining your operating model - I am a big fan of embedding and creating loops.
Roadmap: What user problems do you need to solve to achieve your strategy?
Goals: How will you measure success? Define clear goals to track whether your product ops strategy is having a positive impact.
Feedback loops in your company and how Product Ops can help.
Product Marketing Loop
By facilitating smooth communication and sharing of resources with the Product Marketing team, Product Ops helps maintain a unified direction across the organization.
This alignment is essential for turning “LEARN” marketing moments into revenue opportunities through coordination with go-to-market (GTM) teams.
Taking the learning from these “positioning” tests can help the product team considerably in terms of ensuring that they are building and releasing the “right” features.
I mention in my framework , that building offers is a great way to gauge interest and this kind of approach helps reduces risks in terms of pricing and prioritization.
Sales Feedback loop
“I don’t have visibility into the roadmap”
that’s a usual complaint from the sales team.
The product ops teams ensures that sales teams are well-informed about product functionalities, updates, and best practices, enabling them to sell more effectively and confidently.
One of the things I enabled Product Ops facilitate are regular meetings such as After Action Reviews and Tactical Pauses.
To set the stage for effective AARs, leaders must first create a climate of transparency, selflessness, and candor where team members can challenge current ways of thinking and performing., where sales and product teams can discuss customer objections and situations, review sales results, and plan for the coming quarters
Customer Support Loop
Product Ops ensures that customer support teams are well-integrated with other departments. The ability to quickly communicate a planned action and ETA to a customer makes a big difference to the support folks.
A usually underutilized area is feature adoption. Product Ops works with support and success teams on coaching them to drive adoption around new functionalities. By ensuring that customer support teams are well-informed about product updates and enhancements, Product Ops helps in promoting new features to customers, thereby driving product adoption.
Product Management Loop
Other than helping with synthesizing feedback and planning releases, Product Ops can offer several benefits. The top benefits are streamlining processes and enhancing communication, there are 4 things to watch out for.
1 . Do not add unnecessary complexity
2. Do not emphasize processes over learning
Focus on reducing unnecessary silos
Align with the product strategy
Here are some examples of questions which a Product Ops team should be able to assist with:
When is a feature ready for development to start working on it?
How do we prioritize objections from sales teams?
How can I interview an Enterprise user who is using feature X?
Which product metrics are relevant to the product marketing teams?
Summary : ProductOps : the pillars of success
For your billion dollar startup, the four pillars are shown above. The key benefits are :
Revenue Opportunities: Product ops can turn product updates into revenue opportunities through seamless alignment with go-to-market (GTM) teams and by arming customer-facing teams with the ability to channel the voice of the customer back to the product
Operational Optimization: Product ops is an operational function (with a strategic bend) that optimizes the intersection of product, engineering, GTM teams and customer success, which can be instrumental in maintaining internal alignment and driving tangible results for fast-growing organizations