In essence, the ultimate goal of any production team is simple: Make a product, then make it better. Product managers compile user data, customer feedback, industry trends, and business concern goals to determine their product'due south features and direction.

Still, it's not always this unproblematic twenty-four hour period-to-day, especially when a business begins to scale. As a company launches more products and these products take on more features, systems and processes become too much for product managers to maintain. Added to the confusion is exponentially more product information and user feedback, which must be considered when crafting a delightful product.

This is where product operations comes in. While you may take heard of sales operations or marketing operations, the newer idea of product operations might be less familiar to you. What does a product operations manager actually practise?

Not to worry — in this postal service, nosotros'll explore the office of product operations within the production team and company at large, including what tasks they perform, why they're important for growing companies, and what makes the role different from a production director.

→ Download Now: Free Product Marketing Kit [Free Templates]

What is product operations?

Product operations (or production ops for short) is a role inside a product squad that supports production managers by facilitating cross-team collaboration, collecting and managing data, selecting software tools, and creating standards and all-time practices for internal teams, among other streamlining functions.

The exact responsibilities of a product operations team volition vary from visitor to company depending on the organisation's internal construction, culture, manufacture, and the product(due south) it makes. However, like marketing ops is to marketing and sales ops is to sales, product ops exists to make the product team more efficient, constructive, and consequent.

Why is product operations important?

Going back x to 15 years, product operations wasn't really a thing at companies of any size. Why has this office get so important in recent years?

The biggest benefit of product operations is that it saves product managers time. Before production ops, a production manager was in charge of everything related to their side of the product, from depression-level tasks (e.1000., conducting research, managing data, and establishing processes for the team) to high-level tasks (e.g., making decisions about how the product should work and what it should include). This is a lot of time-consuming piece of work that pulls from various areas of expertise — not the best recipe for efficiency.

With a production operations squad, product managers no longer need to worry about the low-level stuff. Product ops provides the information and insights that inform the production manager'due south decisions, which allows production managers to focus exclusively on their core job: developing, improving, and launching the product and its updates.

Is product operations necessary?

Not ever. For instance, small businesses likely do not have the headcount and resources for a product operations team. In these cases, product ops tasks could be shouldered by someone else on the product squad, similar a product manager or a project managing director.

Yet, as a business grows and its product offerings increase, a defended product operations manager or project operations team becomes an invaluable resource for the production organization. Without product ops, the product squad must devote more fourth dimension and resources to internal work in lieu of developing products. With product ops, product managers tin do their core task while the ops team keeps them informed.

To sum up, product operations is the cloak-and-dagger sauce to a scaling product org. Well, not so secret anymore. Today, they're commonplace at larger product-focused businesses.

Product Operations Responsibilities

If y'all look at the typical product operations role across 10 unlike companies, you'll get 10 dissimilar answers — the responsibilities of production ops depend on the needs of the company. However, this role is generally in charge of the post-obit areas every bit they relate to product teams:

Information Direction

To stay competitive, all businesses leverage data to some extent to assess their electric current standing and shape goals for the future.

In a product org, data helps the team prioritize which areas of the products to focus on. Product managers need to know which parts of the product are working, which aren't, and which could be enhanced with some tweaks. Information from users can guide this piece of work by telling production managers what needs to be addressed first.

Still, extracting information from data is easier said than done. Products and research can generate heaps of data that isn't actionable by itself, and product managers may not have the time to dive deep into customer datasets.

Fortunately, product ops does have the time — a big function of their job is collecting, cleaning, and combing the information for the all-time insights into the production, then sharing this data with the broader production team.

Information could include a range of quantitative and qualitative items, including Cyberspace Promoter Score (NPS), production usage data, results from experiments, sales numbers, and feedback from surveys and interviews.

For instance, if a newly launched production feature is seeing a relatively depression adoption rate, a production operations manager can confirm this with the data and present their information to product managers who then decide whether to improve, change, or sunset the feature.

This of import work past product ops allows others to human action on these insights instead of searching themselves. Production ops helps product managers decide not simply what to do, only where to focus.

Research and Experiments

Besides data analysis, it often falls on the product ops team to collect this information with product research. For case, product ops uses software tools to skim data from product users: which features are used the most (and how), the challenges that customers face, and how "viscid" the product is in the users' daily workflow.

Feedback is another crucial wait into the customer experience — companies need to keep users happy and so they don't merely apply the product, simply recommend information technology to others. The product ops squad obtains customer feedback through surveys, reviews, interviews, NPS, support tickets, and other forms of market research. They also create systems to organize and human activity on this feedback. With the help of product ops, product managers go along customers peak-of-heed without getting bogged down in the logistics of data.

Lastly, production ops administers all experiments run by the product team, making certain that each experiment follows a consistent protocol and won't interfere with other preexisting experiments. Product ops will also unpack the data from these experiments and share insights with production managers.

Processes and Resources

Another key function of production operations is creating, sharing, and refining the processes that ability the wider product team. Information technology'due south their job to place tasks that are fourth dimension-consuming and repetitive, then develop more efficient, standardized ways of completing them.

These tasks may include production research and testing, planning releases, data assay, and product roadmapping. Product ops may also develop the product squad onboarding process for new hires. Additionally, they handle visitor-wide production pedagogy and training, which is essential for keeping marketing, sales, and customer service teams up-to-speed on the product's capabilities.

One time these processes are established, product operations documents these processes and shares them equally resources that product managers can easily reference. Thorough documentation is cardinal for an aligned team, establishing a single source of truth for each internal process. Resources take the form of templates, how-to guides, and lists of all-time practices. They may be stored in a company wiki, internal knowledge base, and/or cloud storage.

Of course, no single procedure is set in stone. As teams, company structure, business organization goals, and industry technologies change, so will internal processes. Inside the product org, information technology's on production ops to update the documentation appropriately.

Tools

To back up its processes, a product team leverages several software tools. A company's armory of preferred tools is called a "tech stack." As a company scales, these tools can number in the dozens and quickly become untameable without an owner.

Product operations is responsible for selecting, implementing, and managing the product team'due south tech stack. They also railroad train product managers on proper apply, write guides, and create all-time practices for each tool.

Once again, with product operations handling the more than low-level duties of the product team, production managers can devote their efforts to perfecting the production itself.

Cross-Team Advice and Alignment

Last on this listing (merely definitely not least on this list), product operations works to go on the product team aligned with other orgs within the company. Past advocating for the users' needs and sharing product value, insights, and goals, product ops helps the entire concern stay focused on its products.

Almost every squad in a company needs to piece of work closely with the product team. Namely, marketing and sales teams need to understand the product to sell it, and may request customer feedback or trends to include in their materials. Engineering needs the product specs to actually build the product, and the service squad can leverage customer feedback and data to support users.

To accomplish this, product ops creates educational materials to update the balance of the company about the product. They likewise share product-related data, resources, and ideas with teams outside of product, and receive important communications from other teams. This collaborative piece of work is critical to preclude a siloed civilization within the business.

Ultimately, communication and alignment between the product squad and other teams keep a business concern competitive. When the product team shares its knowledge and resources, information technology helps other teams acquire new users and support existing ones, resulting in faster growth and more goals met.

Production Operations vs. Product Management

Now that we've unpacked the role of product operations, it helps to distinguish between product ops and the closely related product direction office. While these two work in tandem, product managers and product operations managers have unlike responsibilities.

Essentially, a product managing director develops the product past factoring in business objectives and customer needs, whereas a production operations manager supports the product manager past equipping them with relevant information and processes. Put a different manner, product managers generally own the loftier-level, long-term responsibilities while production operations managers own the depression-level, twenty-four hours-to-24-hour interval responsibilities.

Hither are some examples of how product management and operations interact:

  • Production ops collects, sorts, and organizes product data, then works with product management to extract insights. Product management then uses these insights to guide production development.
  • Production ops and product management may come up with ideas for experiments together. Product ops will execute these experiments and share results with product direction.
  • Product direction creates and implements tools and processes that are used by product management. Product managers may also provide feedback about these processes to product ops to assistance improve them.
  • Equally production management develops the product, product operations promotes changes in the production to the residue of the company.

Note that product-centric companies need product managers, just non all companies demand or can back up production operations. The product ops part is more oft seen in larger businesses with many internal avails.

Production Operations: Keeping the Production Team Running Smoothly

If your concern is scaling rapidly and encountering growing pains on the product team, production operations could exist the solution to accommodate the team's expanding needs. Without it, healthy growth may not be achievable.

All company teams need clearly defined processes, carefully picked tools, and efficient communications with other teams, and product is no unlike. Sorting all this out is a full-time job in and of itself, and then consider bringing product ops into the mix. Given the growing popularity of this office in recent years, your business definitely won't exist the only one.

Product Marketing Kit

Product Marketing Kit

Originally published January 12, 2022 7:00:00 AM, updated January 12 2022