What is Product Operations? (And Do You Need It?)

As companies grow and become more complex, ensuring everyone is working towards the same goals can become complicated. That’s where product operations come in—the much-needed connective tissue of a successful startup. 

Product operations, or product ops, can describe a role, a skill, or a team. These folks sit at the intersection of every part of a company, from L&D (learning and development) to product management, product engineering to customer success. Product ops ensure everyone speaks the same language, has the support they need, and reduces friction so everyone can do their jobs better.

A good product operations discipline can help a company boost its efficiency and organizational performance. But how do you go from various project managers and scrum masters talking at cross purposes to one smooth, aligned machine? In this hub, we’ll cover what product operations means, why it’s essential, what roles and responsibilities it covers, and how to know when your company is ready.

What is product operations?

Product operations, or product ops, is a role or team that supports product management within large software and SaaS (software as a service) companies. They communicate and share data to keep product management teams on track and ensure the right technology is in place to support efficient product-building and insightful data-gathering.

The exact role product ops plays vary from company to company, molding itself around the needs of the process. One of the biggest priorities is to focus on customers at every stage of the process. 

Think of a product ops team as a facilitator, working to ensure your internal processes are efficient, economical, and as successful as possible. Product ops can be helpful even for small companies. According to LinkedIn data, organizations with more employees are far more apt to have product ops roles in their roster. Still, even some very small companies—those with less than fifty employees—have a product ops person on their team.

Why is product operations important?

A great product ops team can ensure inter-team communication is faster and smoother—which means improved workflows, better productivity, and less busy work. Plus, happier people. 

Improve communication between teams

 One of the primary responsibilities of product ops is facilitating communication between teams. As companies grow, teams become more siloed. The sales team is less connected to the product marketing team than it once was, and product management can become disconnected from customer success. 

Product ops can connect the dots between, for instance, customer reps and engineering teams who are busy building out new features.

Streamline product management

Product management teams are often deeply focused on product development. They must check-in with engineers, designers, QA testers, and more. It’s a hectic, detailed-oriented job, and although understanding the bigger picture is part of any job, it’s not always the primary focus of product management teams.

Product ops connect product management to that bigger picture and help the product management teams prioritize according to real product metrics. In particular, the product ops role looks for places to streamline, optimize, and automate processes, so the other teams have less repetitive busy work to conduct.

Properly prioritizing products and features

The product ops team uses data to help the product management team prioritize projects and tasks—which can help create company strategies based on factual information and analyses, not just opinions or hunches. As software companies grow, operations are crucial to aligning strategy with the product roadmap.

Focusing on the customer journey

Products ops teams make sure customers stay at the center of the product development process. They centralize user feedback and customer insights so engineers and designers develop products based around real customer experiences and needs.

Product ops roles and responsibilities

Product ops is a cross-functional role. While the specific responsibilities of a product ops team can vary from company to company, there are a core group of responsibilities that tend to fall under their umbrella. 

What does product operations do? 

Product operations teams take charge of many of the following responsibilities:

• Tools — They research and choose the right tools for inter-organizational communication, project management, prototyping, and more, building a tech stack appropriate for the product team.

• Business process optimization — They manage workflows to facilitate good team communication and collaboration.

• Best practice and goal setting — They orient the greater team around best practices and help create the right project and business goals.

• Priority setting — They combine data, feedback, and business goals to help product teams prioritize projects and tasks.

• Customer insights — They conduct the data-gathering—including mining social media sentiment, customer reviews, and NPS scores—to ensure that products adhere closely to customer needs and expectations and that the customer journey is smooth.

Product managers and product ops people work closely together but from different vantage points. While the product manager stays focused on developing a product, the product ops person keeps day-to-day tasks on track by providing tools, processes, guidelines, and data.

Who works in product operations?

LinkedIn research suggests that the product ops role is mainly found in large technology companies in the US, but it’s popping up more often in other industries and nations. 

Most recognizable names in Big Tech have product ops staff, but you will find them in many “traditional” companies, too.

It’s important to note that while product operations and product managers may sound similar, they’re two distinct roles that complement each other well.

Why your company needs product operations

Product ops improve processes and systems to increase a company’s organization, efficiency, and efficacy. It’s a role that enhances experimentation, aligns best practices, improves cross-functional collaboration, and makes the collection of customer feedback more effective.

Without product ops, you can stave off confusion, miscommunication, and missed opportunities to take advantage of data insights—especially as your teams grow. With product ops in place, clear rules and “swim lanes” can form, and having one person or discipline own the rule-making process can help assuage territorial-ness that can occasionally crop up across interdisciplinary teams.

How to leverage product ops and drive success

One of the primary aspects of the product ops role is to choose the proper project management and data-collection tools for a particular organization. They typically use tools that enable collaboration within and across teams—often cloud-based platforms that can be used to collaborate in real-time for remote or dispersed teams. 

Product operations teams often recommend cloud-native relational databases to give stakeholders the right levels of information. The tools they choose must have the correct balance of features and a user-friendly interface. A relational database such as Airtable, that’s flexible, robust, and secure is often a good fit for project-management needs.

• Download the Product Ops for Your Organization Template

Understanding the purpose of product ops within your organization is the first step to streamlining your product buildouts and making your entire team more effective. 

If you’d like to learn more about using Airtable to support your product ops team, try it for free now.