The ultimate guide to product operations | Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles

[@calico27]

Melissa is one of your best guests! Everything she says is not only delivered so well..but is all actionable and tangible, not just vague and nebulous.

[@melissa-perri]

Thank you so much @calico27!

[@calico27]

@@melissa-perri I love your podcast and am enjoying your courses! Looking forward to the Product Strategy course.

[@ShahedKhalili]

This is why I love Lenny. Back-to-back episodes with one leader who says less product management, and ones who say more product management. There is no one size fit all approach. Love it. Keep the ideas flowing Lenny.

[@LennysPodcast]

haha, indeed! And thank you! Though, if you think about it, the two messages aren't that different. Both are sharing approaches to finding more leverage in your PM team. Brian's approach is to offload work to program managers (plus have your product managers own marketing). This approach is to offload work to product ops. I suspect the two role are essentially the same, but with different names.

[@hcubill]

What a product leader Melissa is. It’s breathtaking to see her express her opinions with such clarity.❤

[@Al-wh1hw]

That's the exact question I also ask at interviews that Melissa asks.. Speaking about failures tells so much about a person's growth mindset, and being comfortable about the messy. Thanks very much Lenny ❤

[@ramon-chanco]

"Product Ops are the Product Managers for the Product Managers" Just want to underline this. Super concise framework for thinking about product ops. Love it.

[@hasa08ab]

Great inspiration! Love to connect with Mellisa and Denise on this topic - super use full discussion

[@productsofmusic]

Great content as always, Lenny 🔥 Great to see contrasting views episode to episode.

[@swarupae2559]

Wow, very enlightening and engaging episode.

[@jsj14]

when 2 of your biggeest role models in Product Manager come in 1 video - Lenny and Melissa !

[@kyrillzlobenko938]

Awesome episode 👍👍👍

[@AngelaFerrari-v9o]

Thank you very much for this great video! :) I am looking for trainings and best practices on Portfolio Management. Any advice?

[@zebramatt]

I think the middle pillar - qualitative insights, user research - is chronically undervalued, hence why it doesn't feature highly in orgs' goals when establishing ProdOps in the first place. "I don't know how my product is performing" and "I can't see whether my budgets are being spent efficiently" are both very visible problems. "Am I actually building the right product" is at the very heart of Product Management, but is a less visible problem to the business. Maturity of Product Ops plays a role here. Once you can see how well things are performing, and your processes are transparent and efficient, THEN the problem of how you decide what bets to take becomes front of mind.

[@ramyaram]

This is great!!

[@ramyaram]

Great job Lenny!!

[@eugenkolbey3450]

so sad to watch that company establish "product ops", so CFO and CPO can talk to each other, Chesky did a better job making huge company more aglie and aligned, that "product ops" motion. Thank you Lenny, it's always great and important to hear from the author.

[@georgialin2446]

Product Ops sounds like an assistant with a fancier name. What is the career path of a Product Ops person, and what are the benefits and growth opportunities for someone who may not have decision-making power but needs to handle all the trivial tasks?

[@praveensg]

Works great for large corporations. Smaller companies cannot afford this level of staffing and you will need to roll up your sleeves to deal with all aspects of product. And that's the only way to learn than by just delegating.

[@praveensg]

And how much strategizing do you need to do on a work day anyway 😅

[@vanaconsulting]

I'm thinking (out loud) this may transform into a central "Rev Ops" groups that owns revenue data, product usage, customer feedback, NPS, win/loss data, user research etc. - synthesizes and provides this data to Product/Marketing/Sales teams.

[@product-thinking]

There are RevOps teams out there already, but they usually don't provide the level of detail needed to monitor Product strategy as they are focused on sales and sales enablement. They're looking at things from an overall perspective but not segmented in ways that help the product managers specifically. If there is a centralized data team that looks at this holistically AND helps product (Doodle does this as a company) I see no problem with the Data areas living together in one centralized team. There is more than just data in Product Ops though, and that's why I think it's important to consider it separate from RevOps. - Melissa

[@vanaconsulting]

That makes sense. My key point is all the areas I listed above - e.g. product usage, customer feedback etc. should not be a departmental initiative. Product ops should not "own" customer feedback as much as CS teams should not own product usage, whether you call this Rev Ops or something else.@@product-thinking

[@product-thinking]

Agree with that! I don't think it's about owning, it's more about surfacing it to the right people in a format they can digest.@@vanaconsulting

[@hrahman3123]

I feel like this new vertical of product ops is open to be automated by AI. Essentially every PM has a Product Ops AI asistant that connects with all your internal & external data and have a coversation about it to help guide the PM. I'm sure its more complicated than that but I can't think of a reason why this wouldn't happen.

[@LennysPodcast]

We actually talk about this, if you didn't see this yet. Will product ops people be automated. Their point is you don't need many. Even just one product ops person can make a big dent.

[@calico27]

Then the prod ops role will become the one maintaining those models

[@bertilhatt]

I was very surprised by the content of this episode: - What you describe here is generally part of the *product analyst* role; there are variations, but for example, gathering data from production databases (what Melissa calls “MongoDB“) is even two other roles: Data engineering and Analytics Engineering. There are also overlaps with User eXperience Research, as pointed out, but those are also clearly distinct roles. - What I’ve heard described as Product Operation is a very different role, where people handle how the product is released and presented after release; in particular, if you have a B2B client, who gets access to which feature through a feature-flag-like system. They deal with who can see early Beta, what feature is illegal in which country, and coordinate with Product marketing on local releases-or one person deals with both. Data comes in when the role is of revenue manager. That presentation describes something close to it: kzbin.info/www/bejne/gF6UgmeLarhrqMksi=392gbcxq4YoTIB0d The dichotomy is best explained in this presentation: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rpq2pHSwmLiWmNEsi=dP86lM_wMS6iFDCH

[@denisetilles2269]

As we describe in the book, a product operations team can look different at every company, depending on the unique needs of your organization. The product operations manager or team supports the *enablement* of faster and better PM decision-making. The videos here mostly are in sync with the book's POV, except for Product QA and the go/no-go call. Product operations may help *inform* those decisions with data, but the final decision belongs to the PM. -Denise

[@siddhantsingh3411]

I have a bad feeling about this growth wise for PMs. We are pushing them away from all the different areas they would communicate with and give that to Product Ops.

[@product-thinking]

Product Ops shouldn't replace good communication between the areas, it should enhance it. I think of it more like making sure the data flows consistently between teams so you can go have meaningful conversations with the others. But Product Ops isn't typically just talking to sales *for* product managers. - Melissa

[@user-kg1od9es5d]

product ops is as useful as product owners.

[@Techzi-co]

Isn't 'product ops' what a lot of companies call 'junior PM's?" sounds like the lead-in position to being a PM

[@product-thinking]

Unfortunately a lot of people hire Junior PMs and do give them the operations work. But, the best way to go from a junior PM to a Senior PM is to give them meaningful product work, but just reduce the scope. I might have a junior PM assisting on a feature or taking a small enhancement on their own with mentorship. Product Ops work actually gets more leverage from people who are experienced than junior. - Melissa

[@olowoporoku1000]

A good agile coach will not run customer research and product discovery activities like scrum. facilitated workshops will be a better option