Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles highlight how product operations is becoming a strategic discipline crucial for organisations aiming to manage complexity, drive growth, and deliver better products at scale by focusing on data, customer insights, and adaptable processes.
Product Operations is emerging as a vital discipline within organisations striving to scale their product management functions effectively. Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles provide a comprehensive explora...
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tion of this field in their book,
Product Operations: How Successful Companies Build Better Products at Scale. The book frames product operations as a means to prevent product teams from collapsing under complexity by establishing essential inputs that support strategy, prioritisation, and efficient ways of working.
At the heart of product operations are three foundational pillars, each serving to anchor the function as organisations grow.
The first pillar, Business Data and Insights, emphasises the critical role of financial metrics in informing product portfolio performance and aligning it with broader business objectives. Relevant metrics include Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), Average Selling Price (ASP), customer retention and churn rates, and research and development (R&D) costs, among others. These metrics serve to connect financial realities directly to product opportunities, encompassing both revenue-generating products and internal tools. Industry resources echo the significance of this connection, showing how product operations translate data into actionable guidance for product development and strategy decisions.
The second pillar, Customer and Market Insights, focuses on ensuring that the product team continuously incorporates external feedback. It deals with challenges such as consolidating customer data scattered across various sources, like sales win/loss records, support interactions, and customer reviews. The book advocates streamlining customer research to engage the right participants and centralise learnings. Furthermore, market research goes beyond academic study; it critically evaluates market size, competitive saturation, and the prerequisites for winning in target segments. This aspect aligns with discussions from other product operations thought leaders, who stress the importance of accurate user insights and market understanding for effective product management.
The third pillar, Process and Practices, centres on creating a robust Product Operating Model. This includes governance mechanisms and planning routines that enable regular strategic dialogues across teams, fostering agility in adapting to changing market demands. It succinctly addresses the necessity of ‘just enough process’ tailored to company needs, standardising activities such as idea management, roadmapping, team onboarding, and toolkit deployment. The role of toolkits, comprising discovery, strategy, and go-to-market templates, is highlighted as a means to reduce redundant efforts and instil consistency without introducing bureaucratic overhead.
Idea management processes ensure that contributions from cross-functional stakeholders and customers are appropriately channelled, formatted, and communicated back, creating transparency and alignment. Roadmapping is delineated by audience: detailed, engineering-committed plans for product teams; higher-level, problem-focused timelines for sales; and strategic, capacity-aware visions for leadership. These distinctions reflect the varied informational needs within organisations and underscore product operations’ role in harmonising communication.
Supplementing these insights, other expert sources expand the scope with additional pillars and responsibilities including workflows, tool integrations, backlog management, and facilitating cross-team collaborations. These elements contribute to seamless execution of product strategies and help maintain focus on data-driven decision-making. Industry discussions frequently characterise product operations as the operational backbone, the often unseen but essential orchestration that ensures product teams function cohesively and efficiently.
Looking ahead, the evolving landscape, with advances in AI promising to automate routine product tasks, raises new questions about the future role of product operations. While the core pillars provide a solid foundation, practitioners must remain adaptable, evolving processes and insights to harness emerging technologies rather than being displaced by them.
In summary, product operations is transforming from a nascent concept into a strategic imperative for companies intent on scaling their product capabilities. By integrating detailed business insights, customer and market feedback, and adaptive processes and practices, product operations equips teams to navigate complexity and deliver better products in a coordinated and responsive manner. The discipline’s maturation is well captured by the foundational frameworks laid out in Perri and Tilles’ book, reinforcing product operations as essential to sustainable growth and product success.
Source: Noah Wire Services
