While product operations is much more of an established function than it was five years ago, it’s still quite elusive. What is product ops responsible for? How can they best support the broader product team? How many people do you need? What does success look like?
These (and plenty of other) questions inspired us to do some boots-on-the-ground research into the state of product ops in 2025.
We interviewed more than two dozen product ops professionals at companies ranging from 100 to 2,000 employees across healthcare, education, energy, human resources, and construction. Some have large product ops teams, some have one or two people handling the function, and some have no dedicated person or team—what we at Pendo like to call “shadow product ops.”
If you want to see the findings and dig into a topic that’s top-of-mind for seemingly every product ops person, check out our new guide: How to prove the impact of your product ops team.
And since one of the best ways to get better at anything is to understand what not to do, let’s walk through some of the most common product ops pitfalls and—more importantly—how to ensure they don’t become reality at your organization.
1. Taking on responsibilities vs. outcomes
If product operations teams don’t prioritize outcomes, they risk becoming perpetually burdened with an ever-growing list of projects and tasks. This can lead to a lack of focus, decreased efficiency, and an inability to drive meaningful change within the organization.
By aligning their work with specific, measurable outcomes, product ops can ensure their efforts are strategic and directly contribute to the overall success of the product and the company. This approach also allows for greater flexibility and adaptability, as the team can adjust their priorities and focus as needed to achieve the desired results.
At Pendo, some of our product ops team’s outcomes have included:
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- Optimize operating systems for all scales (this is one of our team’s core pillars)
- Reduce effort and confusion in the beta process for product teams, and improve clarity for GTM stakeholders (this was a quarterly OKR for our team)
- Create consistency and accountability for product launches using Pendo Analytics (this was a quarterly OKR for our team)
Pro tip: Once you have your drafted outcomes, be sure to run them through an AI chat tool and ask for a critique on how to make them more outcome-focused.
2. Becoming the default project owners
Many of the product operations teams we talked to found that at one point or another, they had become a dumping ground for work that product managers simply didn’t have capacity for.
Product organizations—rightly so—want to find more time for their product managers to do what they do best: understanding and solving customers’ problems. However, a group of people whose job is organizationally defined as “everything else” will always struggle to show value—and ultimately, make an impact on PM capacity.
It’s critical to clearly define what value the product operations team will provide and then show value in those areas. The more the product team understands how product ops has helped in their defined core areas, the more they will recognize the team’s strategic contributions. This helps product ops avoid being perceived as a catch-all, enabling them to more effectively support product management capacity.
At Pendo, for example, we have two different teams that fall under the product ops umbrella:
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- Core product operations: Responsible for process, tooling, and data
- Program managers: Responsible for ensuring execution from ideation to customer delivery
This structure enables us to better focus our efforts and highlight major wins we deliver to the organization within our areas of responsibility. It also helps our product ops team avoid becoming a dumping ground for work that doesn’t have a clear home.
3. Lack of buy-in from leadership
Oftentimes, operational roles solve business problems and internal pain points that are felt by individual contributors, not executive leadership. Not to mention value realization from product ops work is often not immediate, and it can be difficult to measure the impact of this work.
While the outputs of product operations might not always turn heads in a board meeting, they can certainly pay huge dividends over the lifespan of the company. Luckily, there are steps product ops teams can take to demonstrate to leadership the significant value they provide.
First and foremost, listen for the pain points executives express that fit within your team’s foray. Latch onto those problems, solve them, and don’t be timid about sharing what your team did. Solving critical business problems not only gives organizational leadership peace of mind for investing in product ops—it also builds trust and opens a dialogue between product operations and leadership. This dialogue allows you to voice problems or challenges you see (that leadership may or may not be aware of) and then get buy-in for investing in for these projects.
4. Misalignment between product and other departments
There has been a growing movement where ops teams are shifting from an operations-focused department reporting to a COO, to each department in an organization having its own operations team. While this allows individual functions to react to change much more quickly, it can be difficult to operationalize data, processes, and tools across departments.
The good news is that interdepartmental communication across operations teams can still be achieved without a formal business hierarchy. Many organizations—including Pendo—have had success in starting a working group with representatives from each operations department. These teams share what projects each is undertaking, what challenges they are facing, as well as cross-department needs and dependencies.
These groups can initiate projects that operationalize processes and data flows across the organization, instead of maximizing efficiencies only for their siloed areas of responsibility—which may not create an optimized solution for the business as a whole.
5. Navigating organizational change
Many of the systems a product operations team puts in place will be structured around the company’s current operating model. Depending on where you work, organizational changes can be a regular occurrence—it’s not unheard of for businesses to reorganize the product team multiple times a year as the company adapts to changing market needs. Every “reorg” comes with a significant amount of work to update toolsets and processes to align with the new structure and maintain clear lines of communication to changing stakeholders.
While this poses a unique challenge for product operations, it also presents an opportunity for teams to showcase their value. For example, product ops can anticipate and plan for inevitable changes when first operationalizing processes or modifying tools. By emphasizing adaptability in these areas from the onset, product ops functions ensure that they can effectively support the business as it evolves to meet customers’ needs.
Want to learn more about the current state of product ops and how to prove the impact of your product ops function? Read our latest guide.
