Exploring Product Operations – Product at Heart 2023
What exactly is Product Operations? Whether you’ve already got an official Product Operations team or you’re just trying to introduce and solidify some of the foundational concepts of this discipline, we see a growing interest in (and occasional misunderstandings of) Product Operations within the product community. This is why Exploring Product Operations was one of the themed sessions at Product at Heart, in addition to Providing Directional Clarity to the People Around You, Finding Clarity of Thought for Yourself, and Knowledge Exchange for PMs.
This themed session featured three 20-minute talks and a quick roundup hosted by moderator Mirja Bester. During the Exploring Product Operations session, we heard from:
Antonia Landi, Product Operations Consultant & Coach
Sarah Reeves, Senior Product Operations Manager, StepStone
Chris Compston, Product Operations Leader, Bumble
In this post, we’ll share some highlights from each talk. If you’d like to explore any of the content in more detail, make sure you check out the recordings from each session.
🎥 Antonia’s talk: The Product Operations Manifesto: Why, How, and What
🎥 Sarah’s talk: Doing the Right Product Ops vs. Doing Product Ops Right
🎥 Chris’s talk: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Antonia Landi: The Product Operations Manifesto: Why, How, and What
In April 2023, 12 leaders in Product Operations from all over the world came together to co-create the Product Operations Manifesto. As the instigator of this project, Antonia wanted to take us behind the scenes to share why and how the Manifesto came about and what the finished product looks like.
To provide a little more context, Antonia shared some of her personal and professional history. In 2022, Antonia attended Product at Heart (in its previous incarnation as mtpEngage Hamburg) as a volunteer. Antonia said it was a lovely experience for her, finding herself in the sweet spot between jobs when she was grateful for the experiences she’d had in her previous company while looking forward to what was ahead.
“Little did I know that I’d go on to have one of the hardest years of my career,” said Antonia. “I’d go on to join a company as head of operations that didn’t really want a head of operations—they actually didn’t want anything to change.” After six months into her first-ever leadership role, Antonia was let go.
Antonia felt it was important to share her story, because she knows she’s not alone. Nearly anyone in a Product Operations role—especially if they’re the first one in their org—has to advocate for their role and justify their existence to both upper management and their peers.
“I wished I had an artifact,” said Antonia, “Something I could use to start conversations. A document that I could point to and say, ‘This is what I do, why I do it, and this is what I need to do it successfully.’” So she decided to take action, and in April 2023, the Product Operations Manifesto was born.
Antonia provided an overview of the steps and the timeline, explaining that the Manifesto was co-created by 12 authors completely asynchronously because she has a bias for getting things done.
Once she explained the timeline and why she believed it was so important to move quickly—the manifesto would be far more useful out there in the world than in a shared Google doc—Antonia walked us through the main components of the manifesto:
Part 1: Definition
Part 2: Principles
Part 3: Commitments
Part 4: Prerequisites
The Product Operations Manifesto begins with a definition of the Product Operations discipline: Product Operations empowers product organizations to collectively, effectively, and efficiently drive the most meaningful outcomes for customers.
Next, Antonia shared a few examples of Product Operations principles, including flexibility over uniformity and open collaboration over functional separation.
The next section of the Manifesto, Commitments, outlines what the Product Operations discipline collectively commits to doing. The Manifesto contains eight commitments, but in the interest of time, Antonia shared four during her talk.
Finally, Antonia explained that without these two Product Operations Prerequisites in place, product ops as a discipline can never be successful.
Be sure to check out the recording of Antonia’s talk to dive deeper into this topic. You can also read the full Product Operations Manifesto here.
Sarah Reeves: Doing the Right Product Ops vs. Doing Product Ops Right
Sarah Reeves is the Senior Product Operations Manager at StepStone Group—one of the world’s leading job search groups with an ecosystem of more than 40 brands in 30 countries worldwide. In her talk, Sarah shared how product ops went from idealistic theory to realistic practice.
When StepStone first formed a product ops team in 2021, Sarah says doing product ops wasn’t new to her org: “Product managers and leaders had been doing tasks that are now associated with product ops for years.” But the move from a distributed to global platform accelerated the need for product ops to deal with multiple inefficiencies.
To begin, Sarah shared a few of her big hopes for what product ops could achieve, including solving problems, keeping everyone happy, and having fun.
And it appeared to be working—StepStone’s product ops team took a three-pronged approach, focusing on people, process, and product and engaging in a whole suite of activities, such as introducing coaching and training programs, a learning library, product ops OKRs, and a product manager competency framework. The initial feedback led them to believe they were making real progress.
And then it all appeared to come crashing down when someone made a comment to Sarah’s boss’s boss: “You’re not doing product ops right.”
While this was hurtful and frustrating at first, it turned into a learning opportunity for the product ops team and allowed them to identify some issues in the way they’d been approaching their work. “Previously we’d been shielded from senior stakeholders, but now we were forced to reach out and form relationships with them,” said Sarah. “They gave us honest and open feedback on what we needed to do.”
They identified three main issues to focus on: they needed to improve their communication and visibility, articulate their value more clearly, and get better at defining which problems they were solving and who they were solving them for.
Next, Sarah distilled their learnings into five practical lessons:
Lesson 1: One size fits all doesn’t work
Lesson 2: Eat your own dog food
Lesson 3: Show, don’t just tell
Lesson 4: Don’t get caught up in the minutiae or sweat the small stuff
Lesson 5: Don’t listen to your boss’s boss’s mate
Let’s look at each of these lessons in a bit more detail.
Lesson 1: One size fits all doesn’t work
Not everyone wants the same type of training or communication, so it’s important to offer a variety of learning options and communicate through different channels.
Lesson 2: Eat your own dog food
Sarah stressed the importance of treating Product Operations like you would a product, defining your MVP, validating your assumptions, and working as a product trio.
Lesson 3: Show, don’t just tell
This lesson involves both communicating the value of product ops as well as sharing updates on what they’ve been doing recently. “Always have multi-channel communications plans,” said Sarah.
Lesson 4: Don’t get caught up in the minutiae or sweat the small stuff
Getting into public arguments won’t help you achieve your goals, so Sarah recommends channeling your inner Columbo—a detective who collects all the evidence he needs by appearing to be confused and in need of enlightenment.
Lesson 5: Don’t listen to your boss’s boss’s mate
Referring back to the comment from her boss’s boss’s mate that caused the product ops team to completely reevaluate their progress, Sarah said that it’s important to get context for any criticism you receive. If you can get the full context and think it’s going to be useful to act on it, then go for it. But if it’s just a throwaway comment with no context, you shouldn’t feel obligated to take action. Similarly, referring to research and advice from other product teams can be helpful, but just remember that their context is different, so make sure you take that into account before trying to emulate them.
Chris Compston: Everything Everywhere All at Once
To kick off his talk, Chris described the concept of the multiverse: a place where multiple existences or worlds all live at the same time, there may be replications of yourself and others, and there may be different people, different challenges, and problems. (By the way, the Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once, which inspired the name of this talk, is a great introduction to this concept.)
“Any organization that is building a product is a multiverse,” said Chris. “In each of these worlds are the different functions and parts of the organization that fit within the world of building a product—some of them may be product development teams, financial teams, legal teams, or safety teams.”
And any product ops team—whether a team of one or a group, whether they’re new to the org or being built from within—is going to feel the pressure of all of these worlds and places all at once. You’re likely to experience a desire to understand these problems, but also to solve them. And once people hear that you’re there to solve problems, everyone comes out of the woodwork. You have the sense that you need to be everywhere and solve everything all at once.
If any of this sounds familiar, Chris is here to help. He structured his talk into three acts, each which has a different persona for you to take on.
Act 1: Therapist
Act 2: Detective
Act 3: Coordinator
Here’s an overview of how Chris described each role.
Act 1: Be a therapist
When you first join an org—whether in product ops or any other role—you feel like you’re drinking from a firehose. You start to become aware of all its problems. You start to pick up on the challenges in different places.
Playing the therapist role allows you to work closely with people and understand them. Some of your other tasks as therapist involve building relationships with people, getting to know them, alleviating their pressure and concerns, and not just following the light (in other words, don’t just listen to people’s complaints—try to dig in and understand the higher-order problems these complaints represent).
Act 2: Be a detective
Once you’ve built your network, you’re beginning to get deep into each world. Being a detective allows you to understand how the product org operates and find ways to iterate and optimize.
Some of the approaches Chris recommends when you’re in your detective phase include building trust and finding partners and thin slicing (focusing on change that can impact all levels of the organization rather than going deep in one single area).
Act 3: Be a coordinator
When you get to the point where you’re looking across the multiverse and can see all the problems that people are facing, but you have operational partners in all areas who are replicating you, you are now ready to be a coordinator. Chris defines this role as “utilizing the high-level view of the org to identify broader challenges and connect teams and people.”
Some of the tactics associated with the coordinator role include focusing on mindset change vs. behavior change, allowing others to experiment, and amplifying the good by celebrating small wins and sharing them.
Chris summed up by noting that while it’s best to play each of these roles sequentially at first, once you have, you can do them in any order you’d like, depending on the project: “Overall, each of these roles has to be played. You have to understand each role when it’s relevant to be played, how you’re going to go about it, and what outcome you’re trying to drive,” said Chris.
Want to dive deeper into Product Operations—or any of the topics from Product at Heart? Make sure you check out our blog and video archive!
