Three quick tips for taming the product metrics chaos: If you’re a new product ops hire, or even if you’re a small team of product managers looking to put data best practices in place, here are a few tips to get started. In a growing product organization, a product ops team can lay the foundation for a successful, data-driven team of product managers. (This is the most common “data problem” for product managers I’ve talked with). But, it’s far more likely that you either have too much (and are overwhelmed with the sheer volume of it) or you aren’t sure about the accuracy of the data available to you. It’s possible that you don’t have enough data available to make informed decisions. When you look at the volume of data produced the world’s most popular products (Facebook has over 2 billion active visitors, Netflix has 137 million paying subscribers), it’s not hard to imagine the product managers working on those products being overwhelmed by the amount of data available to them.Įven if you don’t work at Facebook or Netflix, chances are your product team has a data problem. Just as the typical product stack has grown over the last 10 years, the amount of data available to product managers has grown exponentially over the last decade. They also work to establish best practices and processes for the use of those tools within the product organization. In a large organization, the product ops team is often responsible for managing the plethora of vendors used by the product team. As product teams grow, the administration component becomes bigger and bigger, and this is where product ops comes in. While product managers often have a wide skill set, managing (and administrating) all the different tools that make up the modern product stack isn’t always the best use of those skills. Tweet This:“The modern product manager has more tools at their disposal than ever before.” From roadmapping to prototyping, the modern product manager has more tools at their disposal than ever before.
One of the biggest changes in product management over the last 10 years has been the increase in the number of tools built specifically for product managers. In general, product ops provide support to the product team in these three critical categories.
One easy way to understand the role of product ops is to break it down into three main categories: tools, data, and experimentation. DataXu has a Head of Product Operations role that reports to the CTO and is responsible for “measuring the product development process and implementing the necessary changes to make it more effective”.Uber has a fleet of Product Operations Managers that are responsible for getting out of the office and talking with as many customers and users as possible.Lever has a Product Ops team that essentially serves as an intermediary between front-line support and Engineering.To give you some perspective of just how much variation there is, here’s how a few organizations leverage product ops. Product ops is a very new field as such, you will see massive differences in how different companies define the roles and responsibilities of product ops. But how does that look in practice? The answer to that varies significantly from company to company. In short, product ops serves to support the product team and help build better products. “Product ops builds a foundation for excellence by reinforcing product strategy with metrics, infrastructure, business processes, best practices, budgeting, and reporting.” You could, therefore, define product ops as follows: I believe that the same definition can easily be applied to product ops. In 2005, MarketingProfs defined marketing operations as follows: “Marketing operations builds a foundation for excellence by reinforcing marketing strategy with metrics, infrastructure, business processes, best practices, budgeting, and reporting.” To understand product ops, it might be helpful to look at another similar discipline: marketing operations. In this blog post, I’ll share an overview of this new role, explain what product operations does, and take a look at how product operations are the new discipline powering product excellence for growing product teams. Many of these changes have led to the rise of a completely new discipline within the product management landscape: product operations. And, organizations can innovate at a faster pace than ever before. Data is an increasingly significant component of product decisions. New tools for product management teams appear frequently, each promising to improve the process in some way. And the landscape continues to change at a rapid pace. Agile, Kanban, and similar methodologies have helped shape the landscape of product management in the 21st century. As product management continues to evolve, many new practices have been put in place to optimize product teams.