Everything Christine Itwaru said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Itwaru: Companies blocking PMs from customer conversations aren't real product companies
“I can count on one hand the companies who have blocked their product managers from speaking to customers. And those companies are not product companies. I mean, they do not believe in product management. They might say they do, but they don't.”
Itwaru: Deep customer knowledge separates product ops from program management
“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.”
Itwaru: Operations teams indicate company growth, not organizational inefficiency
“And so to say ops teams are generally a sign of inefficiency or the need for them as a sign of inefficiency is not always accurate. It's generally a sign of growth and opportunity.”
Itwaru: Product ops leaders must have hands-on product management experience
“The people who are standing up the product ops orgs and being the first prod ops hire, the kind of like leadership level, Our former product people, and I strongly advocate for product ops leaders to have done that role, to have actually had hands-on product e…”
Itwaru: Mature product ops teams become strategic advisors to product leadership
“It's a person or the people, the group of individuals who are strong partners to the product manager. And then for more mature product ops teams, end up people being more strategic advisors to the head of product. So your CPO or your VP, again, when it comes t…”
Itwaru: Product operations is the natural evolution of scaling product teams
“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.”
Itwaru: CPO responsibilities have shifted from feature delivery to bottom-line metrics
“CPOs went from, okay, deliver, deliver, deliver to,
Really increase business metrics or, you know, just help drive the bottom line versus just really look at the product and you really have to figure out what that means for the product team at large.”
Itwaru: Never remove customer conversations from a product manager's core responsibilities
“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…”
Itwaru: In-app content should be part of development's definition of done
“Treating content as a part of the development lifecycle process. You really want to treat it as a part of definition of done, right?”
Itwaru: Product ops should build systems and automate them to stay strategic
“We as product ops want to and should be standing up whatever processes or systems are needed and then get out of the way so we can focus on driving more strategic value.”
Itwaru: Pendo embeds product ops managers across two to three teams
“We do have a product ups person integrated into these teams. I'd say probably all of them at this point, but the key thing here is they share themselves across two or three teams.”
Lenny's Podcast 4