What is Product Operations?
In tech companies, we may be familiar with Product Managers (leading product direction), Software Engineers (handling code to actualize product features and bug fixes), Product Designers (who handle the look, feel and user experience of the product). There is a role that remains relatively unheard of and easily causes confusion.
What is Product Operations?
Product Operations (ProdOps) is a scaling team that brings the user’s voice to the table, monitor user metrics, scale product growth and handle various processes across cross-functional teams.
The role typically comes in towards the later part of the product development cycle, at a phase when the product is ready to scale.
For roles in industry, this maps closely to:
- Product Experts/ Specialist Roles in companies like Hubspot
- User operations specialist
- Customer experience specialist
- User education manager
- Customer Success Managers
- Product Operations in Stripe
What are some specific functions and skills?
- Business data and insights — scoping and collecting product metrics with product managers and the team
- Customer market and insights — gathering and synthesizing user feedback with the designer/ product manager before committing engineering effort
- Process and practices — support product development and management. This can include internal workflow improvements across cross functional teams
- Strategic partnerships — to enable the above
Learn more here
The Ultimate Guide to Product Ops — by Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles, CEO and CPO of Produx Labs
Scaling Product Ops — by Blake Samic, Former Global Head of Product Ops at Stripe and Uber
Decoding Product Operations — by Mathieu Thys (Published on Dualoop, Feb 2024). This echos a bunch of things from Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles
EL5 (toy = product, factory = team):
We have a big and growing toy factory . ProdOps makes sure all the toys are just right and that the kids who play with them are happy. They listen to what the kids want, make sure the toys are getting more popular, and help everyone work together smoothly so the factory can make even more cool toys!
Interested to find out more with specific product case studies?
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