5 problems your product organization is having, and how product ops is the answer

Oftentimes for technology companies, the excitement of scaling is met with struggle.

When you’re at the point of continuously hiring more employees and building more products in parallel — not to mention the products themselves getting more complex — silos emerge, processes that were once effective break down, and efficiency takes a hit.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Product ops can help.

We’ve identified five of the most common problems product organizations (especially those that are scaling) face, and how product ops can help solve them. You might read one and think, yep, that’s us. Or maybe, all five are relevant to your team in some capacity. Either way, product ops is here to help.

#1: Data chaos

The problem: Product managers don’t have time to proactively collect, organize, and analyze product data, making it difficult to make data-driven product decisions.

The solution: The product ops function is not only responsible for collecting data from multiple sources (product health, product usage, NPS, etc.), but also organizing and making it easily accessible for teams across the company. Product ops may set up workflows and cadences for delivering product data, as well as shareable dashboards that update automatically.

#2: Lack of insights

The problem: Product insights reach the executive team once a quarter, at best.

The solution: When product ops is established, this person (or team) becomes the liaison between the product team and executive team. This could include sharing insights to advise on the roadmap, supplying product health data for weekly executive meetings, and ensuring decision makers have the product information they need on a consistent basis.

#3: Feedback holes

The problem: Customer feedback lives in multiple places, with no easy way to see it in aggregate.

The solution: With a dedicated product ops function, this team (or person) manages all customer feedback channels (e.g. in-product feedback and what customer success managers and sales team members are hearing from the field), so that no piece of feedback slips through the cracks. Product ops should also make sure feedback makes it back to stakeholders, namely CSMs and product owners.

#4: Siloed experiments

The problem: Each PM runs their experiments differently, creating inconsistencies and inefficiencies for the wider team.

The solution: Product ops helps streamline the entire experimentation process, both by keeping track of every active experiment and creating processes to increase efficiency. They are tasked with preventing experiment overlap, establishing effective workflows and creating relevant documentation, segmenting user populations, and ensuring the data coming out of experiments is clean and accurate.

#5: Wasted tools

The problem: There are unused tools in your product tech stack (aka money down the drain).

The solution: Product ops should manage the product tech stack, but  more importantly, this function trains the rest of the team on these tools — both when they are first implemented and on an ongoing basis. By facilitating best practices, it helps ensure everyone gets the most out of every tool.