What Is Product Ops: A Guide to Importance and Benefits
Any product team has one goal: to create a quality product that can be improved. For this
product managers collect customer data, user feedback, industry trends, and business goals to determine the features and direction of their products.
Product Ops facilitates communication across multiple teams and plays a crucial role in bringing resources and data together. In addition, product managers’ job simplifies the development process for the development team and helps create user-friendly products.
Some teams believe that they can do without this vacancy in their team. However, we are confident that such a person can significantly influence the intricacies of product management. By the end of this article, you’ll better understand what product exploitation is and why it’s such an essential part of today’s software development organizations.
What is Product Ops?
Product ops is a field that has emerged relatively recently. As a result, this area has become a kind of separate concept of DevOps services.
Product ops are the intersection of product management and operations. A fundamental factor in this area is the ability of organizations to add operational add-ons to product management to solve their problems, resolve disputes, streamline processes and get better results for the company as a whole.
Product operations include various activities and processes that enable cross-functional product teams to manage the product life cycle effectively. This process covers everything from product strategy and planning to implementation, delivery, and post-launch optimization.
Why is Product Ops relevant now?
The tasks for which a product management system was created, including engaging stakeholders, coordinating teams across product lines, customer support, and product data, are quite complex when everyone works in the same office, Forbes notes.
At the same time, the transition to distributed work in 2020 only accelerated the development of this function in companies. Now that most of your team members meet more often on Zoom, companies are increasingly turning to product management and dedicated product management tools as a solution.
Fundamental principles of Product Ops
- People are the most important thing. You need qualified managers who advise inter-functional teams and senior management.
- Clearly defined process, with the elimination of ambiguities and bottlenecks
- Modern tools for managing the technological stack of the product
- Good analytics that allows you to make decisions about the product
- Established communication with all stakeholders
What does the Product Ops team do?
The task of the Product Ops team is to optimize all activities related to product development.
The Product Operations team is responsible for optimizing product development activities. They also help align across product groups to improve communication, collaboration, user feedback loops, and product delivery.
It also provides essential data and actionable insights that enable product managers to make more informed decisions about product development, management, updates, and improvements.
Product managers can also devote more time to these core activities while product managers handle other related tasks such as:
- Research work
- Development of standardized processes and product release templates
- Product technology stack management
- Product quality assurance
- Documentation and Release Notes
- Training of cross-functional teams and stakeholders
- Development of a go-to-market strategy
What is the difference between Product Operations and Product Management
It may seem that these positions interchange with each other. However, not all so simple. Indeed, these roles work in tandem in a company, but Product Managers and Product Managers have different responsibilities.
Essentially, the Product Manager develops the product with business goals and customer perception of the product. In contrast, the Product Operations Manager supports the Product Manager by providing the appropriate data and processes. In other words, Product Managers tend to have high-level, long-term responsibilities, while Product Operations Managers have low-level day-to-day duties.
Why is Product Ops important?
Software development is getting more complicated every year. Many teams are involved in the development process, whose actions must coordinate to get a good result. Teams work on different parts of a product at various stages of its life cycle, all of which play a critical role in ensuring its functionality and quality. At the same time, the more teams become involved in product development, the more difficult it becomes to manage products in general.
The increase in product data and user reviews only exacerbates this complexity. And it is precisely at this time that it is necessary to build a team capable of effectively managing the product.
The product management team ensures that the various teams involved in the product development lifecycle of an organization work in sync towards a common goal. Product Operations enable a cross-functional team to work more coherently by centralizing all of the processes involved in managing the product development lifecycle, from the earliest stages of gathering feedback to successfully executing strategy after launch.
What are the benefits of building a Product Ops team?
In the beginning, it seems to many that the functions of Product Ops can be performed by a project manager, product owner, or someone else from the team.
However, separating the Product Ops functions into a separate team of specialists has its advantages:
- Creating conditions for cooperation between teams
- Unification of the entire development cycle under one management
- Getting fast feedback from one source
- Improved strategic decision making
- Getting insights into key trends that product managers can use to experiment and test new ideas
- Improved collaboration between different team members involved in the product development lifecycle
As a result, we get the effect of high-quality team interaction, which improves the overall impression of the product and, as a result, this leads to satisfied customers.
What qualities should Product Ops Teams have?
The product operation team is a kind of hub for several groups. This means that the Product Ops team must be able to communicate perfectly with colleagues and customers. In addition, the Product Ops team must have the following skills:
1. Collect and analyze data obtained while working with teams and clients. This data includes
key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure performance over time.
2. Create dashboards and make visual reports to provide visual information on time.
3. Strive for operational efficiency
The ability to improve operations and universalize processes makes working with the product team throughout the product development lifecycle much easier.
4. Be able to switch quickly and have a cross-functional vision of their role in the team. The Product Operations team needs to understand what factors (across teams) are driving product-driven growth.
Product Ops team engagement tools
The development team uses several software tools to support their processes. The ” technology stack ” is a company’s arsenal of preferred tools called the “technology stack.” As the company grows, these tools can number in the dozens and quickly become invincible without an owner.
Product operations are responsible for selecting, implementing, and managing the product team’s technical stack. They also train product managers on proper usage, write manuals, and create best practices for each tool.
Again, since product operations are the lower-level responsibilities of the product team, product managers can focus their efforts on improving the product itself.
Demand for Product Operations managers and teams will only grow.
Looking at the facts we have described above, it is clear that the Product Operations Manager is a role we will see growing demand for very shortly. As more SaaS companies shift to a user experience optimization strategy, the impact and importance of product operations will continue to grow. Similarly, competitive pressures to innovate quickly will increase, meaning product teams need to be more agile and efficient. Product operations will be an essential part of this process.
According to Comparably, the average Product Operations Manager in the US makes $163,289. Salary figures for this position may vary by country, but demand will grow steadily to justify salary expectations.
Does your company need Product Ops?
At this stage, you can think about this question and start weighing the pros and cons. But first, we invite you to think – what place does the product operation take in your organization? Are you ready to expand your team or company? The Product Ops idea works well when you need to organize the work of a large number of managers and teams.
As a rule, Product Ops managers take a lot of operational tasks off the shoulders of product managers, helping them focus on creating valuable products.
Consider this: If you need a crucial role in your organization that can facilitate communication and access to resources across multiple teams and ensures everyone aligns with common goals, you need to hire a Product Operations Manager.
Product Operations: the smooth operation of the product team
If your business is expanding rapidly and struggling to grow within the development team, Product Operations can be the solution to meet the team’s growing needs. Without it, healthy growth may not be possible.
All teams in a company need well-defined processes, carefully chosen tools, and effective communication with other groups, and a product is no exception. Understanding this is a full-time job, consider including product work in this process if your company plans to grow further.
Author’s bio: Anastasiia Lastovetska is a technology writer at MLSDev, a software development company that builds web & mobile app solutions from scratch. She researches the area of technology to create great content about app development, UX/UI design, tech & business consulting.