Product Operations

“What I wouldn't hire for that role as a first person is like a data. It's not a database engineer, right? Like that's not what we're doing. We're not like Sequel-ing, like turning things into the right SQL tables. Like we're instead trying to get the info…”

“And agile coaches who have never been a product manager before in a well-run company are going to struggle there because they're going to revert back to agile processes and optimizing for things like scrum, but they're not going to do what that role is designe…”

“I don't have a hard and fast rule on that one, but I would say like if you're at a one-to-one ratio, like you're doing it wrong.”

“And I think for product managers, you still need to be super comfortable with data. Like if you can't read these charts, if you can't see, understand trends, if, you know, and a lot of times too, if you're putting this stuff in Looker or, you know, a BI tool, …”

“They're not project managers. They're not the people who are going to be on top of your developers, like watching them build things, making sure that everything's out on time. That's not their role either. They're not going to handle hard stakeholder conversat…”

“You should never be like outsourcing your decision making to a product ops person. That's not the point. Like they're the product manager for the product managers. That's how I think about it, right? So their decisions should be around how do I operationalize …”

“So we usually see that high growth companies start with business data and insights and make sure that they have, they can actually monitor what they're doing and get the strategic inputs. We see larger companies and enterprises kind of go more towards the proc…”

“Product operations does not take away decision making rights from the product manager. It's there to inform them.”

“The only thing that distinguishes product operations folks from program managers and agile is that product operations people know, understand the product, the customer, and the inner workings of the business.”

“Are you holding them accountable to truly understanding the customer in, in whatever way possible, especially going out and talking to the customer. Please don't have anybody ever take that right. And really spending time with their engineers and the customers…”

“I personally believe there's this natural evolution That happens at any mature function when it starts to grow in an industry and across an organization. So think about marketing or sales, right? This just started to happen with product managers.”

“What I say is it doesn't standardize stuff that only belongs to a team. Like I don't care how a team does their standups. Like you choose how to do that. I'm not going to standardize that, but I do care what format your roadmap comes in. I do care how we make …”

“It's not. Centralizing user research as a practice. It's helping to scale user research so that we can enable more people to do user research, especially when you get into some of these companies.”