Product Operations: The Role Transforming How Teams Build Products at Scale

Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles explain how product operations frees PMs from busy work to focus on strategic decisions and better outcomes.

Key Takeaways

• Product operations emerged to solve PM burnout by taking operational tasks off their plates so they can focus on strategic work majority of the time.
• The role operates across three pillars: business data insights, customer market insights, and process practices that enable better decision-making.
• Companies should start with one product ops person focused on their biggest pain point rather than trying to build a full team immediately.
• Product ops does not take away decision-making rights from PMs but provides better data and systems to inform those decisions more effectively.
• High-growth companies typically start with business data insights while established enterprises focus more on process and governance improvements.
• The ideal first hire depends on the pillar chosen but should have strong systems thinking and desire to operationalize improvements.
• Product ops should report directly to the CPO and serve as their right-hand person for strategic enablement and data-driven insights.
• Signs you need product ops include PMs spending 20-30% of time on data harvesting, lack of executive visibility into product work, or inconsistent processes across teams.
• The role requires different skills per pillar: data analyst background for insights, product management experience for processes, user research background for customer insights.

Timeline Overview

• 00:00–07:41 — Introduction and Product Ops Popularity: Overview of guests Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles, discussion of how product operations has grown from non-existent to present in roughly half of scaling tech companies over the past five years.
• 07:41–18:35 — Benefits and PM Adoption: Why product ops helps companies scale by freeing PMs from operational work, addressing PM fears about losing control, and explaining how the role enhances rather than replaces PM capabilities.
• 18:35–28:58 — The Three Pillars of Product Ops: Detailed breakdown of business data insights, customer market insights, and process practices, including how each pillar serves different company stages and needs.
• 28:58–39:31 — Role Boundaries and Team Sizing: What tasks PMs should keep versus delegate, how product ops differs from project management, and practical guidance on team ratios and scaling considerations.
• 39:31–57:29 — Implementation and Hiring: Step-by-step guidance for rolling out product ops, what skills to look for in first hires, and how requirements differ across the three pillars of expertise.
• 57:29–1:09:35 — Reporting Structure and Case Study: Who product ops should report to and detailed walkthrough of implementing product ops at Athena Health with 365 product teams and lessons learned.
• 1:09:35–End — Lightning Round: Book recommendations, hiring questions, favorite products, life mottos, and mutual admiration between the co-authors highlighting collaboration and professional growth.

The Emergence of Product Operations

Product operations emerged as a response to the impossible scope of modern product management roles. As companies scale and software becomes more complex, product managers found themselves spending 20-30% of their time on operational tasks like data harvesting, customer research coordination, and process management rather than strategic work. The role crystallized around 2019 when companies like Uber, Stripe, and Pendo began formalizing product ops functions and sharing their approaches publicly.

The fundamental value proposition centers on a simple question: do you want 10,000 product managers doing operational work 30% of the time and strategic work the remainder, or do you want them focusing on strategic work the majority of the time with a specialized product operations team creating shared systems and infrastructure to enable better performance? The answer increasingly points toward the latter approach as companies recognize the leverage gained from specialization.

The growth trajectory has been remarkable, moving from whispered conversations about experimental roles to approximately half of high-growth technology companies having at least one product operations person. This rapid adoption reflects both the acute pain point the role addresses and the measurable impact companies experience when implementing product ops functions effectively. The role has evolved from a nice-to-have experiment to an essential component of mature product organizations.

The Three Pillars Framework

Product operations operates across three distinct but interconnected pillars that address different aspects of product team enablement. Business data insights focuses on the quantitative side, ensuring product managers have engagement metrics, revenue data, and business intelligence inputs needed for smart decision-making. This pillar often becomes the starting point for high-growth companies struggling to instrument their data properly or provide executives with product-lens visibility into business performance.

Customer market insights represents the qualitative research coordination that enables better user understanding at scale. This includes building participant databases for research, creating research repositories that prevent duplicate studies, aggregating feedback from sales and support teams, and operationalizing the tools and processes that democratize user research across organizations. The pillar often gets overlooked initially because teams don't immediately recognize research coordination as product operations work.

Process and practices encompasses the operational infrastructure that enables consistent, scalable product management across teams. This includes standardizing roadmap templates and review processes, creating portfolio visibility for executives, establishing go-to-market coordination systems, and building the governance structures that prevent individual teams from constantly reinventing basic operational wheels. Established enterprises often start here when undergoing digital transformation because they lack fundamental product operating models.

Strategic Decision-Making Enhancement

The core value of product operations lies in accelerating and improving strategic decision-making rather than replacing product manager judgment. Product ops teams provide better data, more comprehensive research insights, and streamlined processes that enable product managers to make decisions faster and with higher confidence. The role explicitly avoids taking decision-making rights away from product managers while dramatically improving the information and systems available for those decisions.

Business data insights exemplifies this approach by providing product-lens views of company metrics rather than generic business intelligence. Instead of overall annual recurring revenue, product ops delivers ARR by customer segment, product line adoption by enterprise accounts, and retention patterns by feature usage. These enhanced data cuts enable product leaders to monitor strategy effectiveness and identify opportunities that wouldn't surface in standard business reporting.

The time savings prove substantial when product operations functions effectively. Product managers no longer spend hours learning MongoDB or fighting bureaucratic processes to access basic data. User researchers don't waste time recruiting participants from scratch for every study when participant databases exist. Product leaders can prepare board materials from automated dashboards rather than manually compiling obsolete information every quarter. These efficiency gains compound across organizations to create meaningful strategic capacity.

Implementation Strategy and Team Structure

Successful product operations implementation typically starts with identifying the single biggest pain point preventing product teams from performing effectively. Companies should begin with one person focused on the highest-leverage pillar rather than attempting to build comprehensive coverage immediately. High-growth companies often start with business data insights because they struggle with instrumentation and executive visibility, while established enterprises frequently begin with process improvements because they lack standardized product operating models.

The first hire becomes critical because failure creates organizational skepticism about the entire product operations concept. Companies with leadership bandwidth to coach and direct product ops work can hire talented individuals without direct experience and teach them the product context. Organizations lacking coaching capacity should prioritize candidates with relevant background who can deliver value immediately while building credibility for future team expansion.

Reporting structure matters significantly for product operations success. The role should report directly to the Chief Product Officer and function as their right-hand person for strategic enablement and operational infrastructure. This positioning ensures product ops understands executive priorities while having authority to implement cross-team standards and improvements. Alternative reporting relationships often result in limited scope or insufficient organizational support for necessary changes.

Skills and Background Requirements

Product operations requires different expertise depending on the pillar focus, making hiring strategy crucial for implementation success. Business data insights roles benefit from consultant backgrounds, particularly those with experience creating reports and dashboards for PE firms or VC portfolio companies. These individuals excel at interpreting data, communicating insights to diverse stakeholders, and building repeatable analytical frameworks. Technical skills in business intelligence tools like Looker or Tableau provide additional value but aren't always necessary if strong Excel and PowerPoint capabilities exist.

Process and practices positions require high emotional intelligence, systems thinking ability, and understanding of product management fundamentals. The ideal candidate has product management experience and can design templates, frameworks, and review processes that feel helpful rather than bureaucratic to working product managers. They need sensitivity to organizational dynamics and skill in implementing changes that gain adoption rather than resistance from busy product teams.

Customer market insights roles benefit from user research or research operations backgrounds combined with strong process orientation. These individuals understand good research methodology, know relevant tools and software options, and can build systems that democratize research capabilities across organizations. They should have experience building participant databases, research repositories, and training programs that enable non-researchers to conduct effective customer interviews and usability studies.

Boundaries and Decision Rights

Product managers retain all strategic decision-making authority when working with product operations teams. The relationship functions more like having a "product manager for product managers" who focuses on operational infrastructure while leaving product strategy, prioritization, feature decisions, and stakeholder management with the product manager. Product ops provides data and insights but never dictates what products to build or how to position them in the market.

Specific responsibilities that remain with product managers include setting product vision and strategy, making resource allocation and prioritization decisions, conducting stakeholder negotiations around trade-offs, and owning product outcomes and business results. Product operations supports these activities by providing better data, streamlined processes, and operational coordination but cannot substitute for product manager judgment about customer needs, competitive positioning, or strategic direction.

The boundary becomes clearer when considering that product operations focuses on enabling great product management rather than doing product management work. A product ops person might coordinate the logistics of customer research and provide templates for documenting findings, but the product manager still conducts interviews, interprets customer needs, and decides how insights influence product direction. This division allows both roles to focus on their areas of highest leverage and expertise.

Understanding product operations as an emerging discipline helps explain why so many product managers feel overwhelmed and burned out despite the critical importance of their strategic work. By recognizing operational tasks that can be systematized and delegated, companies can enable their product talent to focus on the customer understanding, strategic thinking, and cross-functional leadership that creates competitive advantage. The three-pillar framework provides a practical structure for implementing these improvements systematically rather than hoping individual product managers can somehow manage an impossible workload indefinitely.

Practical Implications

• Start with one product ops person focused on your biggest pain point (data insights for high-growth, process for established companies) rather than building a full team immediately
• Ensure your first product ops hire reports directly to the CPO and functions as their strategic right-hand person for maximum organizational impact
• Look for different backgrounds depending on pillar focus: consultant experience for data insights, product management background for processes, user research for customer insights
• Maintain clear boundaries where PMs retain all decision-making authority while product ops provides enhanced data, systems, and operational support
• Identify operational tasks that could be systematized or automated rather than consuming PM time on repetitive manual work
• Create participant databases and research repositories to prevent duplicate customer research efforts across teams
• Build portfolio visibility tools that give executives product-lens views of business metrics rather than generic company data
• Implement standardized templates and processes that reduce individual PM cognitive load while enabling consistent cross-team collaboration