Product Ops | take your products to the next level

Digitalization has now become a word that you will most probably hear in any company you might work for or work with. Even the last few skeptical ones have now their digitalization program/track/initiative. We don’t think we even need to highlight the fact that it comes with challenges and a new complexity that has to be managed. To this point, one area in which many digital companies will probably acknowledge they have faced issues, is definitely Product Management. Discover how Product Operations (Product Ops) helps to better organize your work.

Product management as usual

Product Managers have become a key asset in the success of companies managing any type of product, whether we are talking about physical products (eg: a Smartphone), a digital product (eg: an app) or just an online asset (eg: a customer portal). Most of the time, issues start to rise when the company starts scaling and growing.

Current pain points product managers can encounter

• The team stops being product oriented and loses sight of the customer needs.
• Lack of centralization or guidelines in terms of product management within the company or between different countries
• Growth comes with new people, new tools and new vision, getting in the way of a company and its product manager to stay close to its product.

Is multitasking a good thing?

The daily life and schedule of a Product Manager can then become too much for one person. Multitasking turns into deprioritization harming a product when those tasks turn out to be user research, data analysis or product experiments, which is often the case.

Product Ops as a pain point solver

To help cope with those Product Management pain points, a methodology has emerged and proved to be very valuable: Product Ops. You have probably already heard of Dev Ops and there are some similarities between what Dev Ops is to development and what Product Ops is to product management. From one company to another of course, the role of a Product Ops will differ, depending on the needs and structure of the company.

Product Ops impacts

However, in order to give an idea of what it brings to the table, we can summarize its potential and (non-exhaustive) impacts like this:

• Build a proper structure around the product to foster its development. Bring the customer back at the center of the discussion, improve and standardize product development processes, implement the proper tools for product development and management, …
• Coordinate user research activities in order to gather insights that will be valuable to the Product Manager to build a product roadmap and strategy.
• Gather and analyze data around the product. This can be analytics, business knowledge, data from user research,…
• Help in the building of a culture of product experimentation and create feedback loops around those.

In a nutshell, when your company starts growing, scaling or expanding internationally there is a very high chance your product management approach will find bottlenecks. Product Ops will bring the proper structure and facilitate your product management processes so that you stop hitting those walls. Your product will grow faster, in adequacy with your customer needs, maximizing therefore the value it brings to your company.

Written by Thomas Margraff