Product operations is an emerging function. How does it help modern product management organizations to scale effectively? In this Sunday Rewind, we look back to this popular post by Jonathan Hau, Senior Product Operations Manager, who broke it down for us…

Jonathan explains that similar to the emergence of design ops in the last five years, product operations fulfills a need to streamline a scaling function. It defines, communicates, supports, and improves important operations which can be standardized, such as communication, planning processes, team gatherings, and training.

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Why is it so important that organisations consider it? He says how product ops saves us time by cutting down the work to figure out how to organize and systematize routine practices. It frees up time for product managers to focus more of their time doing strategic thinking, user research, problem discovery work, and data validation. Though, the value can be even greater later on by supporting consistency and not accruing debt in the organization.

There is a demand for product managers to perform more tasks

When you add up all the time savings across the team, it quickly becomes apparent that product ops is a critical component to growing product management organizations effectively.

Jonathan does however explain that product operation is not a:

• Technical program management
• Project management
• A replacement for poor/ineffective product management
• A replacement for a data science team
• A replacement for a user research team
• A replacement for a product marketing team

He closes by saying: “Product ops will continue to evolve, becoming an increasingly important function. The best practices that product ops professionals rely on will continue to change and mature as needs shift in large organizations.”

To delve deeper into product operations, read ‘Why Product Operations is set to be the backbone of product-led growth’ in full.