What do you do: Product Ops or Product Oops?

Product Operations has always existed in product organizations. But until recently, product operations was primarily a HAT worn by product leaders and people particularly interested in building a strong foundation that people in the system can leverage. This is changing. Product Operations can be either a hat or the full outfit, depending on circumstances like the size of the team, the stage of the business or the challenges it faces. There is a point where relying on part-time thinkers to maximize the value of the whole product system won’t be enough. When that happens, you need someone to wear the full outfit, and they need to partner with those wearing the hat.

Coherence is key

The mission of Product Ops is noble, as I understand it: to maximize the value of the product team’s work by enabling them with the right environment, skills, insights and tools to carry out their job. The impact extends beyond direct business impact. It directly impacts the way each human being feels about themselves and about being part of the system.

There is confusion around the job, its mission and its responsibilities. Today it seems like we are closer to reaching an agreement on the general mission, at least theoretically; but the confusion around responsibilities remains. I believe that the main source of confusion comes from the lack of coherence between the responsibilities assigned to the job and its mission, leading to little or no impact. And that’s when you think you do Product Ops but all you do is Product Oops.

To be clear, I’m not saying our responsibilities should always be the same no matter the context, the needs of the team or the company. That would make no sense at all. The challenge is to reinforce and influence such coherence, even against the odds.

What a Product Ops person does

You know you are working as a Product Ops when you:

1. Care primarily about the people in the product team, about each one of them and about them as a whole.
2. Create aligned autonomy and strive to continuously discover their pain points along the whole product development cycle.
3. Learn what prevents them from doing their best job, and spot what skills and tools are needed for them to go to the next level.
4. Make sure they have within reach the necessary insights to make better product decisions.
5. Take care of their environment and connections with other teams in the organization.

You know you work in Product Ops when most of your time and effort is focused on discovering which problems and opportunities for improvement there are, prioritizing them, partnering with the right people to ideate and experiment solutions, measuring your bets, validating them, and applying the best one at scale. You don’t necessarily execute all solutions, but you do need to make them happen. And you do all that by wearing multiple hats too, and managing change, time and human factors.

When instead you do Product Oops

However, sometimes you will even have to do transactional and lower leverage work, particularly if you are a one-person team, so you may find yourself doing Product Oops. Hopefully, you will be able to strike a balance and get the support needed so that the mission of the job is not compromised.

You know you are working as a Product Oops when you:

1. Care a lot about people yet apply processes and reports that hamper their progress.
2. Define procedures that kill creativity for the sake of consistency.
3. With the best of your intentions, end up doing what other people do not want to do (or don't manage the time to do) because "someone has to do it".
4. Substitute the managers' responsibility to help each team member bring the most value.
5. Halve the end-to-end job of a Product Manager for the sake of efficiency (does it sound familiar? It reminds me of the old Product Owners discussions).

Basically, despite your good intentions, if most of your time and effort go to Product Oops you won’t achieve the job’s mission, and the worst part is that you will take it on yourself and start a vicious circle of self-blaming and lower self-worth. If that happens, I encourage you to reflect on these questions: do you have the right environment, support and skills to be able to achieve it? And what can you change?

Be intentional

There is a lot of research written about how Product Managers, Engineers and Product Designers need room for proactive work, critical thinking and discovery to be able to carry out their jobs; and how high rates of transactional, low leverage work kill the value they can bring to the organization and therefore their impact, motivation and self-worth. Well, I dare to say that this happens to any conscientious, talented person, also to Product Ops.

For what it's worth, be intentional. Make a pledge to educate everyone in your organization on the job and its competitive advantage. Move yourself, your work and the expectations on you far from Product Oops. This will help the whole community of Product Ops too, and that is a huge contribution.