Not many of us do or are interested in knowing a lot about Product Ops. Even LinkedIn marks a growth of straight 80% on Product Operation skills. Despite such massive growth, why is no one talking about Product Ops?
Product Ops are established to simplify tasks, save time, and focus on building several products that are convenient for the customers. Since the product is the focus of every product-based company, it needs the desired attention to take it swiftly through the journey.
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What is Product Ops?
Product Ops, loosely termed Product Operations, is a common role that varies from one company to the other. Within the product team, there are several roles, and product operation is one of them. It makes communication easy and facilitates sharing of data and resources across various departments.
The intent here is to provide immense support to the product team and make it efficient. This can be easily done by streamlining various processes and managing data and technology.
Many companies are still coming to understand product management and its concepts better. Product Ops blueprint is already out there. Businesses are already working with sales ops, DevOps, etc., for some years now. Depending entirely on the structure of the company/organization and the product they use, the working of Product Ops completely varies.
For instance, Ola has product managers who work together with the product operations manager. They decide together on the aspects that they are planning to construct, and then POM takes care of the implementation and other tasks such as research and marketing. The POM also ensures that the PM has enough supplies to get things off the rack.
Importance of Product Ops
Before we directly jump at what product ops do, let’s understand why is Product Ops even important.
Product is a significant term, especially for product-driven companies. In every stage that customers go through, the product has a role. Be it trials, purchases, expansion, or referrals; a product operation optimizes the processes for being successful in the market.
The product operations team can align with the product management team to use the product metrics and make necessary decisions. The product development process is critical, and PMs can’t plan, build, and implement everything. This is where Product Ops comes into the picture and provides the relevant statistics and data.
Product Ops Manager's Responsibilities
What is the task of a Product Operation Manager?
Again, the answer varies from one organization to another, but a Product Operations Manager generally looks at the sector of development. Product Ops Managers have a knack for solving problems. Depending solely on your domain and the size of the company, you are certain to reach a crossroads with a POM.
The responsibilities of a Product Operations Manager look something like this:
- Gathering and Analyzing data
- Managing the tools used by the product team
- Social Media Sentiment Mining
- Developing and regulating business processes
- Creating strategies for the product team
- Setting goals for the product team
- Straightening out the market research.
Product Ops Advantages
Product Ops is widely being used across many organizations, and the benefits of product ops are:
1. Finding the Right Tools
There are thousands of tools and software that are floating around in the market to serve various purposes of a product. Therefore, it might come off as trouble to understand which tool will yield the maximum benefit.
Making a choice that will fail in the later stage of product development could be tough. The POM comes into the limelight to help the team find and choose the right tools that will help them.
2. Sharing Data
Data is the cogwheel of every business and to have it accumulated, analyzed, and distributed securely to avoid data breaches is crucial.
Having Product Ops makes the job easier as they are well-versed with the concepts of data. Sometimes, the team members can get intertwined when they are asked for data. However, a Product Ops manager will know how to handle and which data to offer in these cases.
3. Helping the Product Manager
Product Ops help Product Management teams who are struggling. Moreover, they can also help eradicate pain points. Also, they spare the PMs to concentrate on other macro-level tasks at hand.
Product Ops Responsibilities
The responsibilities of Product Ops differ from one company to other. Here are some of them.
1. Use Best Practices
The product management domain is constantly evolving. Therefore, product teams need to be extremely competitive to improve themselves.
Product Ops will be of help to stay afloat where these changes are concerned. Additionally, it will also identify the areas that are under the maximum impact. These learnings can be made accessible across teams to extract information.
2. Manage Customer Feedback
As you and I are aware, a successful product management company shifts focus on its customers. Furthermore, you can’t grow until your customers are happy and content. To grow up the ladder, not only do you need happy customers but also for them to buy your products.
The customer experience is the key to this.
3. Streamline repetitive tasks and processes
There are plenty of tasks and processes that every team repeats regularly. However, these tasks could be important but think of the time it consumes. For instance, decoding the feedback from users, sprint planning, and gathering backlogs.
Product Ops takes each of these tasks and processes that are repetitive and streamlines them. This not only saves time but also yields beneficial results.
Apart from these, there are other responsibilities such as making data accessible, working with product stacks and tools, following education programs, etc.
Conclusion
Product Ops as a role will continue to evolve and grow. Nowadays, SaaS businesses are shifting completely towards accumulating customer experience. This means that there will be constant pressure to innovate. Thus, the product team will need to buckle up to be more efficient.
The idea of how a product team works across other areas varies significantly. Their approach to operating could be completely different. So, how does it work in your team?
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