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Three product leaders to learn from at #mtpcon inside Pendomonium

​Becky Flint is the founder and CEO of <a href="https://dragonboat.io/"> Dragonboat</a>, a purpose-built product portfolio platform for outcome-focused teams. Prior to starting Dragonboat, Becky scaled product operations with a responsive PPM framework for PayPal, BigCommerce, Shutterfly, and Feedzai. Connect with her on Linkedin or follow her on Twitter.

Becky Flint

<p>The most successful product-led organizations are full of high achievers. Leading the way is the Chief Product Officer (CPO), who oversees the company’s entire product portfolio. But they cannot do it alone. They rely heavily on someone who can work at the operational level with Product, Engineering, and Customer Success. Product Operations champion this work.</p>
<p>Product Ops is a function that continuously improves alignment, communications, and overall everyday workflows. But great Product Op Managers go beyond focusing on operations. They enable teams, vertical alignment, and cross-functional collaboration by positioning themselves as a strategic partner.</p>
<p>Product operations lead and orchestrates the entire product org to achieve the <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/outcomes-over-outputs-josh-seiden-on-the-product-experience-rebroadcast/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">best possible outcomes</a>. In this post, I’ll cover the 7 habits of highly effective product operations managers.</p>
<h2>Know your customer</h2>
<p>It may seem like <a href="https://www.pendo.io/product-led/how-product-ops-drives-collaboration-in-a-product-led-organization/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Product Ops</a> was developed only to serve product managers. However, this is only partly true.</p>
<p>Today’s Product Op leaders view the entire product organization and their internal stakeholders (i.e., engineering leads, product marketing team, sales) as the customer they serve.</p>
<p>As product-centric companies scale, there will be no shortage of misalignment, lack of roadmap visibility, dependency management, and communication overhead. For these reasons, product operations must expand their reach beyond Product Managers. You have the opportunity to be viewed as a strategic partner, connecting various teams and keeping everyone focused.</p>
<p>By taking a broader view of who you serve, you can own more responsibilities such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Strategic and portfolio planning</li>
<li>Product analytics</li>
<li>Product go-to-market enablement</li>
<li>Agile practices</li>
</ul>
<p>When you understand that you serve more than one customer, you are ready to start enabling outcomes.</p>
<h2>Focus on enabling outcomes</h2>
<p>I see new Product Ops Managers struggle with two areas as they launch their careers. They tend to spend too much time focusing on:</p>
<ul>
<li>Facilitating customer insights</li>
<li>Maintaining legacy processes</li>
</ul>
<p>These areas are relatively low-risk and straightforward to take on and therefore become an easy place to start.</p>
<p>However, stopping here misses the larger picture. If these buckets are the only responsibilities of product operations, it over-simplifies what’s required to run a successful product org.</p>
<p>Instead, product operations should focus on enabling customer outcomes and achieving business results.</p>
<p>A product org is multi-faceted, with many factors driving its success. The most successful Product Ops pros orchestrate:</p>
<ul>
<li>How decisions are made</li>
<li>How data is gathered</li>
<li>How to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the customer, stakeholders, and the business</li>
</ul>
<p>Focusing on outcomes also means you constantly triage the needs of the current and feature market. You drive near-term and long-term results and balance these needs as the product org evolves and company goals shift.</p>
<h2>Connect strategy and ops</h2>
<p>It’s true, operations is in the title. But don’t let that limit your thinking. Product operations is a highly strategic role. Successful Product Ops Managers create opportunities to initiate critical discussions and facilitate alignment between product teams and stakeholders.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">“Product Operations — the art of removing obstacles from evidence-based decision making. Done right, it fuels a virtuous cycle of benefits that’ll empower everyone from the executive team to each contributor responsible for building the products — whether Engineers, Designers, or Product Managers.” </span></p>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Melissa Perri, CEO of ProduxLabs</span></li>
</ul>
<p>Product operations is also instrumental in designing the regular portfolio cadences such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Annual or Semi-annual strategic planning</li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://dragonboat.io/blog/forget-quarterly-planning-you-need-quarterly-alignment/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Quarterly alignment</a></span></li>
<li>Bi-weekly or weekly ops reviews</li>
<li>Stakeholder engagements</li>
</ul>
<p>Additionally, they ensure alignment across goals, enable proper data access, help prioritization efforts remain holistic, and influence all aspects of running a product organization.</p>
<h2>Be fluid, adapt, and evolve processes</h2>
<p>There’s an art to creating process. You could be viewed as just a process person if you do it poorly. However, I believe that the best product operation leaders are creators who fluidly adapt and respond to the dynamic needs of their teams and the business.</p>
<p>You need to focus on the “why” behind the process. Ask yourself:</p>
<ul>
<li>What is the “job to be done” for this process?</li>
<li>What is the outcome the team is trying to achieve?</li>
</ul>
<p>To help maintain this mindset, view and treat your process work as a product. It should continually improve and bring more value to your users (the internal teams you work with).</p>
<p>Don’t just haphazardly follow a process because that’s how things have always been done. Think about your role as a seamless API layer between teams and functions. You’re not hardcoded. You are a flexible connection and can adapt to real-time needs.</p>
<h2>Implement centralized tooling</h2>
<p>Too many tools. Too many spreadsheets. It’s common for teams to decentralize their software choices, allowing each function to choose what they want. However, this requires stitching together lots of spot solutions to see the bigger picture. It means duplicating data from one tool into PowerPoint slides, executives’ preferred spreadsheet templates, or even pasting screenshots into Word documents (yes, I’ve seen it all).</p>
<p>But there’s a better way.</p>
<p>Implement an end-to-end solution to create a central source of truth representing your entire portfolio. We call this solution a <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://dragonboat.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Responsive Product Portfolio Management tool</a></span>. It allows you to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Align OKRs and strategies across all levels</li>
<li>Make data-driven portfolio roadmap decisions</li>
<li>Estimate and allocate resources</li>
<li>Dynamically sync with dev tools like Jira or GitHub</li>
<li>Create and automate the right updates to the right audience for stakeholder visibility</li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-style: italic;">“We needed to have a single source of truth for idea management, a way to enable smarter outcome-based decisions, visibility for senior leadership into investments being made, and general visibility with the roadmap because there was a lot of feeling like things would go into a “black box,” and no one would know what was coming out the other side and when.”</span></p>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Jackie Orlando, Director of Product Ops at Tealium</span></li>
</ul>
<h2>Multiply your team’s growth</h2>
<p>A common misconception about product operations is that the function grows linearly based on the number of Product Managers). For example, for every 10 product managers, there will be 1 Product Ops. But this isn’t the optimal way to grow.</p>
<p>Product Ops is a highly leveraged role. Great Product Ops professionals manage themself out of a job, so they become a force multiplier. The growth of the Product Ops function should be multiple and evolve based on how well you serve the customer.</p>
<p><span style="font-style: italic;">“I like to think of this Force Multiplier Model as having a Product Ops function at the same level as Product Management and Product Design. Product Ops is there to serve as a force multiplier to product managers, product designers and for certain activities, the product marketing managers.”</span></p>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Marty Cagan on the Force Multiplier Model of Product Ops</span></li>
</ul>
<h2>Keep learning</h2>
<p>With 80% of product teams struggling with competing priorities and 97% of companies failing to scale due to misalignment, there’s a need for a new approach. No matter where you’re at in your Product Ops career, you have the opportunity to level up your skills and help your organization focus on outcomes across the entire portfolio.</p>
<p>Communities like Mind the Product are a great source of information. Another way you can keep learning is to try the <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://responsiveppm.org/">Responsive Product Portfolio Certificate Program</a></span> (Responsive PPM) to gain everything you need to become a portfolio pro.</p>
<h2>Be a top product operations pro</h2>
<p>If you are just starting as a Product Operations Manager, keep in mind that your job is not just about improving efficiency. Your objective is to <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/impossible-outcomes-by-bruce-mccarthy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">accelerate product portfolio outcomes</a></span>. The entire company is your customer, and you have the opportunity to make a huge impact.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do everything you can to help your organization balance the right outcomes at the right time</span>.</p>
<p>Your efforts might help drive:</p>
<ul>
<li>Clarity on strategy across all levels</li>
<li>Responsive execution that delivers commitments</li>
<li>Ability to scale without the chaos</li>
<li>Adoption of data-informed decision making</li>
<li>Balance of long-term vision and short-term outcomes of winning in the current and future market</li>
</ul>
<p>But don’t stop there. Keep learning and growing in your career.</p>
<h2>Access more great content on Mind the Product</h2>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/product-operations-an-approach-to-scaling-and-improving-product-teams/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Product operations – an approach to scaling and improving product teams</a></span></li>
<li><a href="https://www.pendo.io/product-led/how-product-ops-drives-collaboration-in-a-product-led-organization/?&amp;utm_source=mtp&amp;utm_medium=display&amp;utm_campaign=mtp-product-ops-collab-q3" target="_blank" rel="noopener">How product ops drives collaboration in a product-led organization</a></li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/product-ops-user-research/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Process as Product: What product ops can learn from user research</a></span></li>
</ul>
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7 habits of highly effective product operations

Becky Flint

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