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Product management is frequently romanticized as a role defined by big ideas, customer empathy, and strategic vision. However, the day-to-day reality for many Product Managers (PMs) often devolves into drowning in spreadsheets, manually harvesting data, and fighting fires. As companies scale, the administrative burden on product teams grows, leaving little room for the high-leverage work they were actually hired to do. This friction has given rise to one of the fastest-growing disciplines in tech: Product Operations.
Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles, authors of Product Operations: How Successful Companies Build Better Products at Scale, argue that Product Ops is not just an administrative layer; it is the key to unlocking strategic value. By creating shared systems and infrastructure, Product Ops allows PMs to stop doing "side-of-desk" work and start focusing on outcomes. From the three pillars of the role to hiring your first practitioner, this guide explores how successful companies are operationalizing their product strategy.
Key Takeaways
- The Core Mandate: Product Ops exists to increase the speed and quality of decision-making by removing operational friction and providing accurate data inputs.
- The Three Pillars: The function generally covers three areas: Business & Data Insights, Customer & Market Insights, and Process & Practices.
- Decision Rights Remain with PMs: Implementing Product Ops does not strip PMs of autonomy; it informs their decisions rather than making them for them.
- Start Small: You do not need a massive team to begin. Successful implementations often start with one person tackling the organization's single biggest pain point.
- Hiring Profiles Vary: The ideal candidate depends on the specific pillar you need to solve for—data analysts for insights, former PMs for process, and researchers for customer feedback.
The Necessity of Product Operations
The emergence of Product Ops is a direct response to the increasing complexity of the software landscape. Ten years ago, a PM might have managed a small stack and direct customer feedback. Today, the role involves navigating complex data ecosystems, coordinating with sales and support, and managing diverse stakeholder expectations. When PMs are forced to spend 30% to 40% of their time on operational tasks—like learning MongoDB to query a database or manually scheduling user interviews—their strategic output suffers.
Melissa Perri frames the choice for leadership clearly:
Do you want to hire 10,000 product managers and let them all do these things off the side of their desk... or do you want them concentrating on strategic work majority of the time and then help build a product operations team around them?
This role has shifted from a niche concept to a standard function in scaling tech companies. Approximately half of high-growth startups now employ at least one Product Ops professional. Companies like Uber, Stripe, and OpenAI have pioneered this function not as a bureaucracy, but as an enabler of speed.
The Three Pillars of Product Ops
Product Operations is often misunderstood as a catch-all for "stuff PMs don't want to do." To operationalize it effectively, Tilles and Perri categorize the work into three distinct pillars. Depending on the company's maturity and immediate needs, a Product Ops team may focus on one or all of these areas.
1. Business and Data Insights
This pillar focuses on quantitative inputs. It solves the problem of data inaccessibility, where PMs struggle to get necessary metrics without engineering support or complex SQL knowledge. A Product Ops function here builds the dashboards, establishes the metrics, and connects product data (like usage and retention) with business data (like ARR and churn).
For executive leadership, this is critical. It transforms raw data into a narrative about product health—viewing revenue not just as a total number, but segmented by feature adoption or customer cohort. This clarity enables faster strategic pivots.
2. Customer and Market Insights
This is the qualitative counterpart to data insights. As companies scale, user research often becomes duplicated or lost in silos—sales has one set of feedback in Salesforce, support has another in tickets, and PMs have notes in Google Docs.
Product Ops centralizes this information. They might implement tools like Dovetail to create a research repository, manage participant recruitment databases to ensure PMs can easily find users to interview, or aggregate feedback from go-to-market teams. The goal is to make qualitative insights retrievable and actionable so the organization stops "learning" the same things over and over.
3. Process and Practices
This pillar addresses the "how" of product management. It involves governance, tooling, and standardization. In rapid-growth environments or large enterprises, inconsistent roadmapping formats or disparate toolsets create chaos for leadership trying to understand the portfolio view.
Product Ops establishes a product operating model. This includes standardizing roadmap templates, managing the tool stack (e.g., Jira, Dragonboat), and facilitating cross-functional alignment. It ensures that when leadership asks for a roadmap, they get a consistent strategic view rather than 80 different spreadsheet formats.
Addressing the Product Manager's Fear
A common resistance to Product Ops comes from Product Managers who fear losing control. If someone else is handling data queries or customer recruitment, are they still managing the product? It is vital to distinguish between operational execution and strategic decision-making.
Product Ops does not make trade-off decisions, define the product vision, or handle difficult stakeholder negotiations. Those remain the core responsibilities of the PM. Instead, Product Ops functions as a force multiplier.
Product operations does not take away decision-making rights from the product manager. It's there to inform them.
If a PM judges their value by their ability to write SQL queries or schedule meetings, they are focusing on the wrong metrics. Their value lies in the outcomes they drive for the business. Product Ops removes the friction that prevents them from achieving those outcomes.
How to Start: The Team of One
A major misconception is that launching Product Ops requires hiring a large team immediately. In reality, the most successful rollouts often start with a single individual.
Identify the Burning Fire
To begin, conduct a "listening tour" within the product organization. Identify which of the three pillars is causing the most pain. Is the data unreliable? Is the research process a bottleneck? Is executive visibility non-existent?
Denise Tilles advises focusing on the highest leverage point first:
- High-growth startups typically start with Business & Data Insights to monitor health and speed up decision-making.
- Large enterprises undergoing transformation often start with Process & Practices to establish governance and visibility across hundreds of teams.
The Profile of the First Hire
The background of your first Product Ops hire should match the specific problem you are solving. There is no single "Product Ops" archetype.
- For Data Insights: Look for data analysts or former consultants. They need to tell stories with data and handle tools like Looker or Tableau. They do not necessarily need a product background if they can be coached on what metrics matter.
- For Process & Governance: This requires a strong product background. A former PM or product leader is ideal because they need high EQ to influence peers without authority. They understand the nuances of roadmapping and can distinguish between useful process and bureaucracy.
- For Customer Insights: Look for backgrounds in User Research or Research Ops. These individuals excel at organizing qualitative data and managing compliance and recruitment logistics.
Case Study: Scaling at Athena Health
The implementation of Product Ops at Athena Health provides a clear example of how this function evolves in a complex environment. The company had over 360 product managers and 5,000 developers but lacked a formalized product operating model.
The Problems:
- Executive Blindness: The CEO had to dig through Jira tickets to understand what teams were working on.
- Strategic Disconnect: There was no clear link between daily work and high-level goals like retention or enterprise market expansion.
- Data Silos: With R&D resources massive, there was no easy way to track allocation or ROI.
The Solution:
The team introduced a VP of Product Operations to oversee the transformation. They started by standardizing how work was categorized in Jira—moving beyond "build a button" to defining substantial epics. They implemented portfolio management software to roll these epics up into a coherent executive view.
Simultaneously, a separate Research Ops function (led by Jen Cardello) systematized customer insights, building participant databases and ensuring compliance. This allowed the organization to connect strategy to execution, giving leadership the visibility needed to steer the ship without micromanaging 5,000 developers.
Conclusion
Product Operations is not a fad; it is the maturation of the product management discipline. As software becomes the backbone of nearly every industry, the "hero PM" who does everything from coding to selling is no longer a scalable model. Great products are built by teams that have the infrastructure to learn fast, decide quickly, and align effectively.
Whether you are a startup of 20 or an enterprise of 20,000, the principles of Product Ops offer a path out of the "build trap." By treating the product organization itself as a product—one that can be optimized, iterated on, and improved—leaders can ensure their teams are spending their limited time on the work that truly matters.
