Product operations play a vital role in product development and cross-functional team communication, and between the company and its customers. It is one of the best ways for your organisation to communicate with customers about your product and one of the best ways of tracking your product’s performance on the market post-launch.
If you’re considering a role in product operations or wondering how to level up your product development department, this article is for you.
In this article you will find out:
Let’s start!
By understanding and implementing these insights, businesses can leverage product operations to drive growth and success.
Product Operations aim to streamline the work done in an organisation. It focuses on ways to make teams work more effectively.
The three main areas product operations deals with are:
A Product Operations Manager will typically deal with:
You probably already deduced that the Product Operations Manager has the task of helping the Product Manager do their job with success, especially when the Product Manager’s key tasks are in question.
As companies require Product Managers to have a more creative and people-oriented approach, Product Operations Managers were introduced to handle the daily operations.
Product Managers function, in a way, as customers to Product Operation Managers. While PMs (Product Managers) are concerned with developing specific products, Product Operation Managers focus on the aforementioned daily operations - those repetitive functions that concentrate on sleek development and continuous optimisation of multiple products.
All in all, PMs and Product Ops need to collaborate a lot. If the PM needs information for decision-making, the product ops team collects, analyses, and passes over that information.
One of the fields in product development under the Product Ops Manager's supervision is the post-launch period. That is when Ops test requirements for markets, facilitate experiments, and provide value to end users by monitoring and optimising the product’s performance.
As a Product Operations Manager, you need both soft and hard skills. Even if you’re well-versed in technical stuff, you need to know how to facilitate communication between teams. After all, you will be the glue between product marketing, product development, customer success, and even some other sectors!
Below we will list useful things you can implement to nail your role and help your business grow. If you're looking for additional real-world examples, check out this guide.
To be truly successful, an organisation needs to become more effective at every step of development. Especially as it transitions from having one to a few product managers or from having a small number of products to an expanding portfolio. In other words, the company needs a strong foundation to handle both the product concept stage, the post-launch stage, and everything in between.
You must have the big picture of the expanding business and develop ways to turn disorganised tasks into repeatable checklists. That can guarantee that the cross-functional team has a plan for how to function effectively as the business continues to grow.
Stakeholder alignment is a big challenge for companies, so it’s no wonder this is the primary duty for product ops. It's difficult to keep everyone in the loop, informed, and on the same page. The more people there are, the more difficult it becomes.
Product ops teams succeed when they communicate with stakeholders more regularly and follow their preferred techniques, tempo, and degree of detail. The team can document this personalised, standardised communication. Additionally, the team can determine stakeholder satisfaction by conducting a survey or just casually questioning people.
More challenges will pop up as you grow. One of those challenges will be a bigger product tech stack.
Some ways to effectively follow that growth and optimise processes with software solutions are:
If you enlist these tasks among your role responsibilities and create guidelines for use of the aforementioned tools, you can help yourself, and your team by educating them.
Don’t be afraid to experiment and find out the best things for your company’s product. In case you are unsure where to start and afraid of making costly mistakes enlist the help of expert product development consultancy that can analyse and suggest useful ways to develop further.
Product data management is one of the bigger issues facing the tech business environment of today. The previously mentioned sophisticated tech stack creates a vast amount of qualitative and quantitative data every day.
Organisations rely on Product Operations to maintain the data analysis clear and accessible in the face of exponential data volume expansion. Product Operations teams develop relevant and important usage data systems to capture and keep track of strategic product metrics like Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) to later share insightful knowledge with Product Managers to assist them in making accurate, data-driven decisions. That is done as the processes of gathering, reviewing, and analysing data become more complex.
Product operations are about facilitating effective work and communication in the product team. That makes the company more susceptible to growth and success. The growing efficiency allows the team to innovate quickly and ultimately build better products in an exciting and fast-growing environment.
Use what you’ve learned today to launch your company into the realm of success.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
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