[On Demand] Product Management Webinar: Product Ops

[00:00:00] Janna Bastow: Let’s get back to the main show. I want to introduce you to Denise Tilles.

[00:00:05] Denise, thank you so much for joining us here today. Denise is a distinguished leader in product management and product operations; she’s not just a practitioner, but a visionary. She’s dedicated to advancing the field and empowering the next generation of product leaders. And she’s got over a decade of experience at companies like.

[00:00:25] Bloomberg and Athena Health, and she’s driven transformative change across a bunch of different industries. She co wrote Product Operations with Melissa Perry, who you probably know from lots of different places, but who’s also been on this webinar with me in the past. And that, that book offers really deep insights into navigating the complexities of.

[00:00:50] Product management in the digital age, but particularly this new space of product operations. So we’re going to be diving into that. And we’re going to be talking about this really interesting concept of how to set up product operations in your company without having to make new hires. So Denise, I want to say big welcome and huge thank you for joining us here today.

[00:01:14] Everyone’s saying, what a 

[00:01:15] Denise Tilles: lovely Intro appreciate it. 

[00:01:18] Janna Bastow: Of course. Yes. Thanks for joining us. I want to talk a little bit about your background. I mean, I obviously skimmed over quite a lot there because you’ve been doing this and building out your product experience for years now.

[00:01:31] How did you find yourself in the space of product operations? I mean, it’s obviously grown up around you. 

[00:01:37] Denise Tilles: Yeah. It’s funny. We talk about that in the book. And any online bookseller near you? We talk about that in the book where I started with that and how Melissa and I ended up intersecting on that.

[00:01:48] I led and built product and UX teams, B2B, SAS, and some B2C companies like Condé Nast. And a company I was at a B2B SaaS called Scission. I was just about to take the role and my leader, STP of products said, would you like to have a product analyst? I’ve heard of such a thing. This was back in 2014.

[00:02:10] And we ended up hiring someone who was absolutely overqualified for the job. And we built a little team around her. And the team really understood that my product managers are working in a team of about 10 folks and had a really good sense of what the product was, what the opportunities were, but also had that really secret sauce of objectivity of having a little bit more removed from the data.

[00:02:34] And they were able to highlight a potential opportunity with one of our products that ended up making a million dollars the first year in beta. It wasn’t even on our rate card. It was just a back of the pocket product. Oh, wow. I was like, Oh, this is great. That smell you add. Yeah. Right. So we had a Product analyst who did a lot of the quantitative analysis, and then we had a user researcher and the head of the group was thinking about strategic initiatives with my product team.

[00:03:00] Fast forward to 2019 started working with Melissa and she mentioned something about product operations, like, wait, what’s that? And the way she explained it, I was like, oh, that’s what we were doing, but it didn’t have a name. And we started digging into it more. I was working at her consulting firm’s product labs and really understanding the leverage it could offer companies where supporting insight partners, a venture capital company with their portfolio companies and, thinking about where it might be able to offer leverage in terms of scaling.

[00:03:31] A lot of their focus was on scale up companies. Really dug in there, created a masterclass that I still run today. And I’m like, I still can’t believe nobody has written a book about this. What if I did that? She’s like, that’s a great idea. And what if you wrote it with me? And I knew that she was still in a little bit of a PTSD from writing build traps, but she agreed pretty quickly and took us almost three years to write.

[00:03:55] So that was our pandemic project and it came out in October and we’ve had an amazing reception to it. So I love talking about product ops and this topic today about how to set it up in a scrappy way is something that gets me really excited. 

[00:04:09] Janna Bastow: Yeah, that’s brilliant and huge congrats on getting the the book out there and you said get the book at any retailer Amazon, Barnes 

[00:04:16] Denise Tilles: and Noble, Auto, 

[00:04:18] Janna Bastow: yeah, all right, excellent.

[00:04:20] I think it should be on everyone’s list. Absolutely. And it was oh Ian in the chat said is that products 

[00:04:27] Denise Tilles: labs, P R O D U X, like prod, UX products, labs. And I can send out some links to the masterclass after the event, but I 

[00:04:36] Janna Bastow: put that, I put that in the products lab products with a UX on the end.

[00:04:41] There we go. It was actually really really interesting because going back a couple of years now feels like just yesterday, but Melissa was on this same webinar. And she described all the things that. Product operations were, and maybe we can repeat this experiment because she described all the things that product operations were.

[00:04:57] And then I said to the audience, everyone who’s here is listening. And I said, who here feels like they’re doing all the product operations anyways? Denise, could you explain, could you outline just briefly what product operations are, and then we’ll just do a quick poll and find out hands up. Who’s doing this?

[00:05:13] So hands up as you hear it, if this sounds like you. 

[00:05:16] Denise Tilles: Okay. At the highest level, it’s really about making sure the product managers have everything they need to make faster and better quality decisions. And around that are three pillars. And that’s what we outline in the book, the three pillars of product operation.

[00:05:29] So the first one is business and data insight. So the quantitative product engagement, revenue metrics, who’s doing that now. We’re going 

[00:05:38] Janna Bastow: to start seeing some hands up. Cause I know, yeah, there’s some hands going up already. So product people do all the data stuff. And yeah, according to 

[00:05:49] Denise Tilles: Some experts, they should be doing that.

[00:05:50] Janna Bastow: There’s like a dozen hands up, which is yeah, not unexpected to see. All right. What are some of the other pillars? 

[00:05:58] Denise Tilles: The second pillar is customer and market insights. So more of the qualitative insights. Yeah. Who’s doing that? 

[00:06:05] Janna Bastow: I’m seeing more hands going up even more yet. We’re up to about 15 or so hands.

[00:06:11] Okay. Yeah. 

[00:06:12] Denise Tilles: Okay. And then the final one is around process and practices, the operating model. Ways of working, how can we simplify the way that we collaborate. So we don’t spend time talking about how we’re doing the work. We actually do the work, 

[00:06:27] Janna Bastow: right? Yeah. And I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone’s hands go up.

[00:06:31] I mean, I thought this is, I thought this was all stuff that product managers do. Do and I was really surprised to find out that actually product managers should be spending their time communicating with stakeholders and actually spending more of their time in discovery and figuring out the problems to solve.

[00:06:47] And that’s the value-added stuff they should do. And there’s a whole other area that could be done by product operations, and that allows them to have this time to go do. They’re discovery and customer facing work and more stakeholder facing work. That was a bit of a moment. Yeah. And I think a lot of other people at the time.

[00:07:08] Denise Tilles: Why are we hiring product managers? It’s to deliver on our business goals. It’s to support customer needs. It’s to work well with stakeholders. And it’s not necessarily writing a SQL script off the side of your desk. Cool, if you want to do that, but at the end of the year, when you look at what you were gold on probably wasn’t that SQL script.

[00:07:26] So how do we make sure you’re focused on the things that matter that you’re being measured against? 

[00:07:30] Janna Bastow: Yeah. Now, so I mean, all well and good that these could be separate functions and I’m sure back in 2021 when people started realizing that product Operations could be a different area.

[00:07:41] You could hire extra people. There were lots of people being hired, but this is 2024 and there’s not all that much extra VC money sloshing around and all this sort of stuff. So how do we set up product operations without making, all these extra hires? 

[00:07:58] Denise Tilles: Right. Yeah. I gave a keynote at the product led alliances, product operations summit in March.

[00:08:05] And my topic was. Leaner times, how and why product operations is more important than ever. And I really grounded it around the layoffs that we’ve had just in the first quarter of 2024 and even the end of 2023. Right. So you had a Spotify number of folks and. If you guys recall, there was a memo that Daniel Eck, the president of Spotify, wrote and he was explaining why they were having, I think, 1, 500 people that were laid off in December, a lot.

[00:08:37] And he said, we have to get back to not focusing on work around the work, but the work. And I said, I think he means us. But I thought, it’s misguided. It’s misguided because how do we, especially in these leaner times, our resources are even more scarce and more important than ever. How do we know if we’re making the right bets?

[00:08:58] How do we know if we’re getting all of it, if we have the right inputs to make decisions? And so that’s why product operations are more important than ever. You think about areas in terms of revenue, how are we capitalizing? The expenses we have are how do we double down on building the right things in terms of speaking to customers and making sure we have the right, quantitative insights surrounding the product manager.

[00:09:21] Yeah it’s really important. And I did see a number of product ops folks laid off, but I’m seeing a lot of new hires, people being hired and like Netflix, really. Adding a huge team there. So I think people see the value of it. It may have just been the fear or bandwagoning of and cloud cover that, a layoff of Spotify.

[00:09:46] Well, maybe this is time we could let go of some people too. So yeah, it’s more important than ever. And I think as most companies don’t have the resources to hire up an entire team. I’ve worked with a couple of very large retailers that have done that, but typically it’s one, you prove the value and then discuss what’s above the line in terms of capability, what’s below the line.

[00:10:07] If we had more resources and build out that way but you can even bring it down to a more. Baseline level of thinking about who do we have on the team now that may be doing some of this really excited by this type of enablement work and how do we redirect them in a way that’s not changing their job yet, but it’s a quick wins and then proving the value and then making the case, well, maybe we should have them focusing on, it doesn’t have to be all three pillars.

[00:10:36] It can be really where the biggest area of need and opportunity is at your company. 

[00:10:40] Janna Bastow: Yeah. And so how does the product person help figure out where the biggest need or opportunity is? 

[00:10:47] Denise Tilles: Well, that’s what’s great about using someone internally because they probably have experience at a pain point and they know it acutely.

[00:10:54] But to do it and make sure you really are understanding the full opportunity set a discovery sprint. And really understanding, you may have your perspective on where the gaps are, but. To your fellow PM’s talk to your cross functional stakeholders, where are we showing up? Well, where are we falling down?

[00:11:11] Where do we need to be better partners? And that can help identify. Here’s the highest value and highest need and prioritize it from there And that’s where you would start 

[00:11:21] Janna Bastow: Okay. And break that down for me. What do you mean by a discovery sprint? Is that like a customer facing discovery sprint?

[00:11:26] Or is this like an internal process discovery? 

[00:11:29] Denise Tilles: Internal. Cause in the end, the product managers are our customers, right? But you’re not only speaking with product managers, but also our go to market team, our sales team is biz ops. We don’t want, if you have an ops team and other departments understanding, where’s, where could product be showing up better in terms of partnerships.

[00:11:48] So it’s really about understanding and speaking to folks and doing interviews around what’s going well and what could be better. And in the book we interview Shintaro Matsui from Amplitude, and he stood up product operations from the ground up there. And that was 1 way that he went about it.

[00:12:04] His 1st month there was just speaking to everybody. He could understand, like, all right, there’s a huge need to redo the go to market process. I’m going to do it. Well, you know what? Maybe let me get some smaller wins first. So it’s making sure that your eyes aren’t bigger than your stomach in terms of what you can take on.

[00:12:20] Janna Bastow: Yeah. So Amplitude Is obviously doing something right. How big were they before they figured out they needed the product operations? 

[00:12:27] Denise Tilles: That’s a great question. I know that they were at a single product and about ready to go to a portfolio, more than one product. And that was 2020, I think. And that was the inflection point for them.

[00:12:40] But as we talk about it in the book, there’s different pain points, uber added it in 2000 added product operations in 2015 and it was around the need came because they were scaling so quickly and moving to different geographic regions that the connective tissue was just, splitting apart in terms of what, the biz team was doing.

[00:13:01] Doing what the product team was doing, what was rolling out, what the road map looked like was changing a lot. So things were starting to fray and Blake Samick, who is a recognized leader in the space. He created product ops at, uber and stripe, and now he’s just introduced it to open AI. He was there to set that up from ground 0, but it was really about those sort of frame tissues, connective tissues.

[00:13:23] That made them realize we have to get this in hand. 

[00:13:27] Janna Bastow: Right. Okay. So companies are now starting to realize and get ahead of things, realize that they need to bring outside experts in to set up product ops before they get to a certain point. So you mentioned Or you’ve hit 

[00:13:38] Denise Tilles: that point and you Or you’ve hit that point, yeah, exactly.

[00:13:40] You haven’t planned ahead. 

[00:13:41] Janna Bastow: Yeah. So you mentioned moving from single product to multi product. Are there any other triggers, trigger points that people should be looking for that are like the obvious trigger points? Points that you start saying we need to set up an official product operations space.

[00:13:56] Denise Tilles: In terms of making sure you’re managing your reduced resources, do you have visibility into what the R and D team is actually spending their time on? There was one client I worked with. They. Couldn’t figure out why they weren’t getting the roadmap delivered. And we did some research and discovery with the teams and found out that the ways that the engineering team were categorizing their work were somewhat misleading.

[00:14:21] And that also uncovered a problem that the executive team was pushing for new releases, new features, every couple of weeks. And that was creating a lot of load for the product team, the engineering team creating a lot of bugs, and they were hiding these bugs in different categories, like.

[00:14:36] Continuous integration, continuous discovery. Right. So they didn’t have any clarity on where the revenue, excuse me, where the resources were actually being spent. So do you have visibility to that? And if you don’t, if you get to the end of the year and you’re like, wait a minute, we had, a headcount roster, like 50 engineers, but we delivered 10 percent of our roadmap.

[00:14:56] What’s going on here and having that insight and being able to change your bets midstream, not getting to the end of the year. What happened? Having that visibility, that’s a big piece of it, especially now with these resources as companies get bigger. Roadmaps, you probably know this Janna tends to be a pain point.

[00:15:15] And that everyone may be doing them differently. They may have different formats, different ways of expression. Some are Christmas wish lists. Some have been absolutely vetted in terms of level of effort and how we’re going to resource it. So standardizing that becomes a pain point. And also that portfolio visibility.

[00:15:31] And a lot of product leaders don’t even know that they should have that. So when they’re like, Oh, I could have that. That’s amazing. So that’s another moment where people are like, okay, we’re tracking this, but not really. And, Steve is expressing this as, more of a Gantt chart, Alyssa’s expressing this by feature.

[00:15:49] I’m a huge fan of Now-Next-Later personally. Someone might be doing it that way. So how do we get to more standardization and a lot of teams that I advise. It’s not that the product managers are wedded to a certain template of a roadmap. Just tell us what you want. We’ll do it. And I think it’s a lot of swirl that the teams have.

[00:16:08] And that’s where I think a pain point can present itself as well. 

[00:16:11] Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I’m seeing this from our point of view as well. I do a lot. I sit in on a lot of what we call roadmap clinics and a roadmap clinic is basically like it’s roadmap therapy or a roadmap troubleshooting uh, session where basically people are taking their roadmaps and, one, one team will come in with a roadmap that looks like this and the other roadmap will look like this.

[00:16:32] And we try to consolidate it and get it standardized into something that looks like a nice Now-Next-Later format that fits within the new ProdPad account. So we’d run these things all the time. If anybody’s actually interested in that get. Get get in touch and we’ll be happy to help set that sort of thing up.

[00:16:47] But you’re right. That’s like an inflection point when you’ve got multiple teams running off making different roadmaps and you just want, somebody in the team wants them to just be able to meld together so they can communicate in one way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There’s been questions that have been coming in, in the chat.

[00:17:03] Robin asked the question around, what do you see the difference between a product analyst, a business analyst and product operations? I think this is one of those Conversations around the different titles 

[00:17:13] Denise Tilles: often end up in discussions, whether we’re needing business analysts, partial overlap with product ops, which of you on this, I hate to use these two words, but it depends on how you have it organized.

[00:17:23] Janna Bastow: It wouldn’t be a real product management chat if it wasn’t, it depends somewhere. Yeah, 

[00:17:29] Denise Tilles: It, yeah, definitely it can feel like who’s doing what. And where do we actually, where did the roles and responsibilities line? I think as long as you all are clear about how you define these roles, it doesn’t have to be, there’s not like 1 way to do it.

[00:17:42] So I think that’s hopefully a freeing way to think about that. Whether we need business analysts. I’m seeing fewer business analysts in a lot of companies I work at these days. It’s either a product analyst or I see product owners. I don’t love that product manager, product owner bifurcation, but I do see that.

[00:18:00] So in terms of how I would think about structuring it, possibly not knowing how your company is set up product analysts working closely with the product managers on pulling, not creating, pulling and putting into a lens of product, what’s important to us, the qualitative, the quantitative, and hopefully you have an existing team and you’re not reinventing the wheel.

[00:18:21] It’s just making sure that these things are being accessed and that they’re accessible for your product managers. If there are new needs, how do we request those from the team? Because oftentimes I will see. Like 10 product managers requesting six flavors of the same thing from the BA team. And they’re like, whoa, which do you want?

[00:18:38] So product analysts can help with that. The business analyst let’s see. So discussions whether we need business analysts overlap with product ops. And it’s, I think what’s also important is it doesn’t matter where they live per se, it’s about the value they’re bringing and as you think about those specific roles and how you define them.

[00:18:56] So I think the world’s your oyster. You just wanna think. Maybe take a stab at defining them yourself and seeing if you get alignment around that. We have business analysts thinking about requirements and we have prod ops, product analysts thinking about business intelligence. So some way like that to at least get the conversation started and thinking about where they differ, but the value they bring.

[00:19:18] Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of value there’s actually a couple of questions in the Q and A that I think work really well together. Matthew asks, how do you think about proving the value of ProductOps? And somebody else asks, how do you measure the success of your ProductOps team? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:33] Denise Tilles: That’s a challenge and really mature teams still struggle with this, right? So a lot of it’s going to be. Qualitative, self reported. Am I more productive? Also I think a way to measure it is thinking about the before and after. So if you had a product team that was maybe spending 20 percent of its time, even just extracting data to actually analyze, and then you measure what they delivered on and how they met their goals year one.

[00:19:59] And then you compare it to the second year of where you actually had product ops. I would like to think that Delta would be quiet. Start in a good way in terms of the things they were working on. So I think that would be important like, value add work before and after would be 1 way time spent efficiencies.

[00:20:18] That’s a way of measuring as well. This is definitely something on my mind that I want to think about next. Type of update is like a product operations scorecard, right? How do we think about samples as a broad way of thinking about what are the most important things to measure?

[00:20:35] But the most mature teams, I know, still have a challenge with this. And I think it’s about reflecting back. The value you’re bringing and making sure everybody understands that, but also having a heuristic of what you’re constantly updating or deprecating. If it’s not providing value. So mentioning Shintaro amplitude again, he does a sprint every quarter where they go through the processes.

[00:21:01] Are these working? Is anyone using them? What are these for you? What’s working, talking to the cross functional stakeholders. We do a product newsletter. Is that valuable? Yes. Number one in the product manager. Like, no, we don’t want to do this. But. It’s important for the cross functional stakeholders to get that.

[00:21:15] So evaluating and thinking about ways of improvement, or do we move on and think of something else? That’s really important. But also. I think someone mentioned this earlier about replacing yourself, right? If there are AI mechanisms to do some of the lower value work, by all means, use that. So I’m seeing folks using chat to write up release comms. And then moving on to higher value work. So wherever you can create value, figure out how to replace yourself and automate it, move on, find other value. That’s a huge win as well. 

[00:21:48] Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. And are there any heuristics on figuring out how much time you should be spending slowing down to work on processes versus just.

[00:21:58] Mucking in and doing the product management work that needs to be done like this, actually doing the customer discovery and working with the customers. Because ultimately, the stuff that adds the value is the stuff that’s delivering the value to the customers, but you do need to slow down and do the process work so that that work can be done.

[00:22:16] Should it be 50-50? Is it 80-20? Does it depend? How do we know? 

[00:22:21] Denise Tilles: Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree. And so when I was chatting with Melissa Perry about this the other day and there’s been discussion about, you don’t need operations. It’s product teams to do this. But, she pointed out like, it’s a little naive to think as you’re scaling.

[00:22:36] That you’re not trying to, pardon me,

[00:22:41] Amazon calls. But you’re not going to think about a process to help, make sure that you’ve got guardrails around that. Otherwise mucking in at a team size of 5. great. But when you’re 25, how do we make sure the product managers.

[00:22:56] Janna Bastow: I once had this conversation with a team, they were trying to make this case for product operations and as a team of about 10 of them and they were just on that cut. They weren’t sure if they needed it or not. And I said, well, how much time are you spending on things like, figuring out your data and your processes and your tooling and stuff like that, and they worked out that they’re spending about 15 to 20 percent each on this.

[00:23:18] So I’m like, okay, well, assume you can get rid of at least half of that each. There’s a whole person. That’s a job. So put that off on somebody else. And now think of how much more free time you have to go do your actual product management job. They soon made a hire. 

[00:23:32] Denise Tilles: Yeah. Oh, that’s good. That’s 

[00:23:34] Janna Bastow: good.

[00:23:34] Scott asked a question around, do you see the product organizational structure affecting the implementation of the role in its success? So I’m guessing about the pre existing structure of the company. Does this have a bearing on how well this product ops holds? 

[00:23:49] Denise Tilles: I mean, that’s a good call.

[00:23:51] I think that the culture counts. And if you don’t have buy in from the top, your CPO. The CEO, you’re gonna have a really hard time building consensus from the ground up. So having that at the top level really makes a difference. And having them, whether it’s at all hands or something like, we’re really excited about this team or jazz and helping tell the story.

[00:24:14] That’s huge. The product organizational structure of the implementation I’ve seen product ops get set up with product and then once or twice. I’ve seen it move over to, like, a sales ops team. I think that’s a little strange and centralized ops. But I have seen it but typically the most effective structures that I’ve, in our deep research, we’ve done in my experience as a product advisor and consultant is the head of products reporting directly to the CPO and that’s really their secret weapon.

[00:24:44] Right? How they, they don’t have time to decide, like, how are we going to get in the nitty gritty of setting up roadmaps are going to review what’s been Tried and tested, but they’re not going to sit down and like, okay, guys, here’s your now, here’s your next year, your later it, a large scale company.

[00:24:59] You’re going to need a product ops person to be thinking about that touching base with the CPO. Who’s hopefully thinking about revenue strategy MNA and things like that. 

[00:25:10] Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. And what are some of the misconceptions that you’ve come across? Yeah 

[00:25:16] Denise Tilles: that product operations is the usurper of product management and a pretty well known podcast that Melissa and I were on in the fall.

[00:25:27] Made that point and I think we made the case and I think they came to understand the point of view that it’s not a usurper. It’s more of an enabler, right? And, they’re not taking things away. Hopefully they’re making sure that the product manager is supported with everything they need to make those faster and better quality decisions.

[00:25:45] So product ops is usurper. That’s definitely a misconception that it’s a catch all. I’ve seen a couple of companies set it up, product ops, where they’re doing QA and handling bugs. Not what I would necessarily suggest, but if it works for you, great. So they try to do things that folks don’t want to do.

[00:26:05] And those are the primary things that I typically see. 

[00:26:09] Janna Bastow: Right. Okay. Yeah. I can’t see the case for it being a usurper. I can only see it being like an enabler empowerment. Right. Like, Hey, I want to focus on the product value ad stuff and not the rest of it. But maybe some of the folks who love actually getting involved with those pillars that you’re talking about, maybe they actually want to be in product ops and they don’t like that stuff being taken away.

[00:26:30] Denise Tilles: Exactly. Exactly. In which case there’s 

[00:26:33] Janna Bastow: a. A lot of different career paths in product ops, if that’s the direction they want to go for sure. Yeah definitely. So with the spirit of setting up product operations without making new hires, is there anything to do?

[00:26:46] Bringing in people from other spaces in the business, pulling some resource from your best customer success rep or your support person or a QA person, in the past, for example, when I was a QA, not a QA, when I was a product manager, my QA specialist was.

[00:27:03] Basically like my product ops person, right? He’s my data person. He eventually became a product leader over the years. He found his path into product that way, but for lack of a better word, he was like product ops. That makes sense. 

[00:27:18] Denise Tilles: Have you seen that path going in? That’s a really good point in that in the book, we have a fictitious CPO and story that we follow along with.

[00:27:27] So when we wrote the book, it was really important to me that we include the core content of what product ops is. This fictitious story that sort of exemplifies the types of challenges and wins that companies can see. And Melissa did this in Escaping the Build Trap, and I thought it was really effective.

[00:27:42] And then that third layer was about three things you can do today to get started. We wanted to be super actionable. Yeah, I love that sort of thing. Within the story the first product ops person actually comes from sales ops. And it turns out this person had worked in product at some point, ended up in sales ops, really wanted to get back into it.

[00:28:00] They were super jazzed about, enabling the revenue information. So if you don’t have someone in product management, maybe there’s someone in one of your partnership stakeholder world that is interested that you might be able to get like 25 percent of their time, because it’s going to benefit you sales, because Product is going to be more focused on retention or churn or whatever.

[00:28:21] So you always have to make it about what’s in it for them. And that’s understandable if you’re asking someone else to allocate some of their resources towards you. But if you do that, decide very carefully what you’re working on, what good will look like, make sure they understand they’re excited about what this person will work on, and that’s where you start building.

[00:28:40] The momentum and the consensus, but that’s a really good call. Janna. Yeah. 

[00:28:43] Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. And John asked a good question here. He asked about your thoughts on product owner versus product manager, and actually brings up an interesting point. Like, is this too many product roles? Are we splintering out into all these different places?

[00:28:56] Have you got product ops, product managers, product owners, or should we pick two? Well, some people say that. Do you see teams that have all of them? Yeah, I do. 

[00:29:08] Denise Tilles: I do, actually. I mean, product owner to product manager, let’s just leave product ops out of it for a sec, right? My, my particular point of view is that it just creates this bifurcation between the strategy and the delivery.

[00:29:23] And also, there’s not really one sense of ownership. And I know that this is a model that is espoused with a safe scaled agile framework which I’m not a huge fan of, but if it works at your company, I’m not going to say don’t do it. I’m a big fan of meeting people where they’re at. And if that’s working for you, cool.

[00:29:40] I’m not going to tell you’re doing it the wrong way. But that’s typically my concern about it because the POs become the product founders are so delivery specific. And understandably, it’s about meeting that deadline or getting it out the door and not necessarily as focused on the value where upstream the product manager had done the strategic analysis and business case.

[00:30:02] So I just find it’s a little like playing telephone. So that’s why I’m not a huge fan of it. 

[00:30:08] Janna Bastow: Yeah, 

[00:30:08] Denise Tilles: I see that. How do you feel, Janna? 

[00:30:10] Janna Bastow: I mean, I, one of the most difficult things about product owner, product manager is that the titles tend to get muddled. Yes, that’s true. And so I, more often than not, I see product owners who end up doing the product management or product managers who are doing product ownership stuff.

[00:30:27] Ultimately, if you take product ownership at its purest, it was actually meant to be a role and not a title. And so ultimately you say, well, what is the product owner meant to be? And it’s, as you say, it’s meant to be more of a delivery type role that doesn’t have as much of a hand in the strategic side of the product side of things.

[00:30:47] Yes, the team can have both. And yes, in which case there would be a place for all three. I would just make sure that they are clearly defined and you know what each person is meant to be doing and that there is clear handover so that you don’t end up with a product that is being tossed from one to the other like a hot potato and no one wants to hold onto it and no one has clear ideas to what actually needs to be done with it.

[00:31:10] Denise Tilles: That’s a good point. Actually, as we’re talking about this, it occurs to me that, We have product owners because the product managers are so busy with the strategy, ostensibly, if you had product operations, that’s taking some of that onus off of them and you wouldn’t necessarily have to have the owner.

[00:31:25] And you have that person there from, ideation to delivery, the product manager. That’s such 

[00:31:30] Janna Bastow: a good point. Such a good point. Yep. And John, thanks for that question. Matthew asked a good question. He said, do you find a particular archetype or personality that fits well in product ops?

[00:31:41] Yeah. 

[00:31:42] Denise Tilles: Yeah, so let me start first with the functions. I’ve seen them do really well. Product manager for sure, because they’ve done the job. They have that empathy. Do they have to be product managers? No, but I love to see that customer support. Definitely see a lot of folks there. They have that empathy for the customer.

[00:31:57] Deep, deep empathy there. So I see a lot of success. Transfers from one role to the other in terms of an archetype or personality type, they’re curious, right? They’re super curious. They are systems thinkers. That kind of stuff just gets them going and makes things more efficient.

[00:32:15] Ooh, I have a little of that in me. And I think it’s folks that just really love digging in on things that make people’s lives better and their industries around this, not just in product. Right. And I really want to make sure that we’re building the right thing. So I have a passion for it.

[00:32:30] But a lot of times I’ll see product managers are like, you know what, I dig this more. I’d actually like to move into product ops and at the master class that I teach a lot of folks are either there that they were product managers or customer support and are thinking about like, would this be the right role for me?

[00:32:47] So those are, I think a lot of folks that tend to think maybe I’ll make this change. 

[00:32:52] Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. Good one. Okay. So something really practical. So Craig asks, so we talked about how we, to determine if you need a product ops, what are the first steps to we’ve got a bunch of people here, probably a bunch of them have determined that they need to set up some product operations, I mean, what do they do next?

[00:33:09] Do they, they start presenting this to their team and saying, here’s Why we do it. Here’s what we’re going to do. What are they going to take back to their team tomorrow to start actioning this? 

[00:33:19] Denise Tilles: Yeah. What you want to think about is what are the opportunities and the gaps? So highlighting that thinking about the highest value, if we solve these things today.

[00:33:30] And so identifying the needs, prioritizing that. Proposing what that could look like if we solve them, if we do X, Y, then Z in terms of an outcome and then you propose how you might consider solving that without needing to hire someone today. We think that Craig on the team is super passionate about this.

[00:33:56] And if we carved out 30 percent of their role to focus on this for two quarters. These are the outcomes we can expect and the wins and make sure you’re under promising and over delivering. That would be the way I would start out, but I would definitely have a hypothesis and you could frame it as the 3 pillars, but say, these are typically the 3 pillars of product operations.

[00:34:20] I think that our company over indexes in the quantitative. Business intelligence, but we’re really. At a deficit in terms of customer inputs. So we need to figure out how to work better with user research. We need to figure out how to empower the PMs to do some of the research themselves and talk to customers or, we’re in a swirl every time we get to the quarterly business review or annual planning.

[00:34:44] How do we not do this again next year? Let’s just say, it’s February. Let’s get ahead. 

[00:34:48] Janna Bastow: Yeah. So sounds like what we do pretty naturally anyways. Right. So identify a problem, set a hypothesis, make a case and set some target outcomes and go at it. But any examples as to what sort of things we might be up against, like when you’re saying finding opportunity areas, like are we saying, we think that our data.

[00:35:07] Tools are a mess. So we’re going to try to tackle that. Or is it, around, we think that the way that we handle our product retros is out of whack. So we’re going to fix that. Are these the sort of things we’re talking about? 

[00:35:19] Denise Tilles: Right. I think that’s a really good call and you want to make sure it’s within your scope of influence and control, right?

[00:35:25] So a new tool. Maybe not, you’re going to have to do all of these sort of gap analyses and then go, if you’re a big company, go through procurement. Do we get it? How do we integrate it? If you’re at a really big company, like a bank, it’s got to go through security reviews. So maybe don’t do that.

[00:35:40] As you, what was the other one you mentioned, Janna? 

[00:35:42] Janna Bastow: Yeah, something like retrospectives, for example. Retros, 

[00:35:44] Denise Tilles: exactly. Maybe doing some research on like, the most successful retros and I know Holly Hester Riley had a great piece about that, that she reposted recently about how to handle those.

[00:35:54] So small things that you can get your arms around that you have the sphere of influence and you can actually make a change. Yes, try not to, bite off, go to market, think about aspects within that. 

[00:36:05] Janna Bastow: Cool. And I’m gonna find that article from Holly and I’ll post it as the, in the transcript.

[00:36:11] This. Yeah, I’ll send that out. Yep. Yeah. Cool. So everyone got a copy of that? Good stuff. We’ve got some other questions here. Deepak asked a question here. He said is pillar number one the quantitative insights and the core responsibility of the data analyst? Are they the same? If not, what are the differences?

[00:36:29] Denise Tilles: Of a data analyst and the 

[00:36:31] Janna Bastow: core responsibilities of the data analyst. Is that the same as the pillar one, the quantitative insights? 

[00:36:37] Denise Tilles: Yeah, it just depends on how it’s set up at your company. I’m seeing this a lot lately where really established companies have business intelligence teams. The product is the last in line to get fed.

[00:36:50] Which is backwards to me, I know I’m a little prejudiced around this, but so part of that is like, figuring out, do we, are we getting what we need? Or do we need someone thinking about what we have established here? And how do we extract that in the most efficient way? In the most product centric way?

[00:37:08] And that’s where someone in product ops could help. And if you’ve got a data analyst in it, the Data science team, they might be working with the product analysts within the product ops team to just harness all of these existing resources. If you’ve got all of your product team, 10, 20, 30 people going at your data science team.

[00:37:28] That’s going to really reduce the ability to serve all of them. So if you have 1 person thinking holistically about the team’s needs, you’re probably going to get that more quickly. So that would be 1 way to think about it. And the way I talk about it in the class, it’s like, we’re not reinventing the wheel.

[00:37:44] We’re not. Doing the, creating the business insights. We’re not setting up new tags. If that exists, it’s just making sure there’s a flow of it. And then secondly, do product managers know how to act on it? And that’s where I see a lot of challenges too. Yeah, 

[00:37:58] Janna Bastow: absolutely. Absolutely. We’ve got another great question here from Volker, do you have any recommendations for an early stage company?

[00:38:05] On which mistakes to avoid so that introducing product ops becomes easier to laser later stage when the company’s bigger. 

[00:38:13] Denise Tilles: That’s a good point. I love that question. You could almost think about how you organize the team and enable the team around those three pillars. What are we doing around business insights?

[00:38:24] What are we doing around the quantitative? What do we do around customer and market insights, the qualitative? What are the systems we need to put in place or thinking about at what point might you need these systems? Just almost in a road map in a sense, nothing fancy, but just thinking like, what are your scaling inflection points?

[00:38:42] Like if you guys are going for a series B, what does that mean in terms of the size, Of your team, the size of the company, the goals that are going to be like, are you going to 10 X? How do you get there? Oftentimes I see, the leaders decide we’re going 10 X and then you guys figure out how we get there.

[00:38:59] How do we make sure we’re ready to jump when we get those infusions of support. So that would be one way I think about that. If you want to consider the three pillars and how are we supporting the product today? And what do we think we might need tomorrow? And then imagine out, like, what would be that inflection point where we might need one person and what would they focus on?

[00:39:19] Would this be someone just around product analysis or do we need someone more thinking about the ways of working our operating model? 

[00:39:28] Janna Bastow: Absolutely. Excellent. Well, I’m conscious of time because I know that we had to call a hard stop. So Denise, I wanted to ask how people can learn more about you and your work and your book and your classes and all that sort of good stuff?

[00:39:39] Denise Tilles: Oh, gosh, thanks. You’re welcome to go to DeniseTilles.com and ways that you can work with me as a, uh, I advise companies on setting up product operations. I do selective coaching with Product ops leaders and then also work with more enterprise level companies on larger just product maturity transformations as well.

[00:40:01] But I will include all of the links and look forward to connecting with you all on LinkedIn or however we end up. Being able to connect. 

[00:40:08] Janna Bastow: Yeah. Thanks so much for being here. Everybody says thank you to Denise. And before we go, I just want to give everybody a heads up on what’s happening next.

[00:40:16] Next week I’ll be back. We don’t have a special guest. It’s just me. We’re going to be talking about how to calculate the ROI of your product management work. It’s going to be hands on. We’re going to be Looking at how you actually do these calculations. So this will be a fun one. And also mark your calendars for these upcoming webinars that we’re going to be running.

[00:40:37] So we’ve got Teresa Torres coming in for June, Dave Washa coming in July and Adam Thomas coming in August. So get your calendars marked for those. And finally for those of you who haven’t already gotten on board with ProdPad Book your demo. Get involved. It’s a sandbox there that you can start jumping in and playing around with.

[00:40:59] We’ve got example data and example OKRs and things like that you can play with and start trying out. And as I said we’d love to get your feedback on it and find out how it works for you. In the meantime, a huge thank you to everyone for getting involved, for all your questions and for all your chats.

[00:41:15] Good to have you all here. And most of all, Denise, thank you so much for joining us here today. It’s been really enlightening. All right. Thank you all. And bye for now. See you next time.