How to boost growth by making your product teams more efficient
By Luke Galliwade, Product Principle at ustwo
Product teams are busier than ever. We have more data to understand, more stakeholders to manage, and new technologies emerging.
This easily leads to problems around efficiency and effectiveness. There can be a need for alignment across teams for consistent decision-making. Work can quickly become disorganised, and time gets wasted. The potential to learn from each other is reduced and we need help to keep our stakeholders inspired and on the journey.
Enter ProductOps.
The goal of ProductOps is to increase efficiency and effectiveness. ProductOps diagnoses problems the product team faces – from the tools they’re using to challenges with leadership – and works to fix them.
Though the term is relatively new, strong product teams have shared ProductOps work between roles for years. Lately, it’s started to gain popularity as a skill set, role or sometimes even a department in its own right. Mature, product-led companies have been the first to adopt ProductOps as a function.
Building efficiency across different structures
Essentially, ProductOps is scaffolding around the product team and supports it run smoothly. However, the definition of ProductOps varies based on business size and sector.
For instance, in an industry like financial services in which compliance is a central issue, processes are linear, with defined stage gates. Individuals have more latitude in a start-up team, but that lack of rigour in a discovery process around understanding feasibility, viability and usability can lead to a waste of resources.
Meanwhile, massive organisations are highly regulated, and product teams and efficiency can be stymied by all of the hoops to jump through and the involvement of multiple stakeholders.
Where ProductOps can boost efficiency – and your bottom line
There’s a lot of overlap in skills and responsibilities between ProductOps and traditional product teams, from customer empathy to data fluency. “It’s very easy for companies to just assume/expect a product manager to handle ProductOps, because we have for so long,” says Sam Falotico, Lead Product Manager at IGN.
If a product team is doing ProductOps, it’s typically driven by the Product Director or Head of Product. Larger organisations which have PMO and separate delivery functions to product teams can also be involved in ProductOps – whether they realise it or not – because they are involved in deciding on tools, cascading information and managing multiple (often siloed) teams.
But even if all the ingredients exist, there is often still a need in many organisations for a focus on ProductOps. The discipline can have wide applications, but here are some common areas where ProductOps can add value and help organisations succeed.
Distributing insight to create a consistent foundation for decision-making
ProductOps can help to create deep user understanding through a holistic approach to gathering, refining and interpreting research and data from across teams. Distributing insights reduces siloes to improve alignment and understanding between stakeholders. It makes the relevant insights available to everyone so there is a consistent decision-making foundation.
Supporting decisions
Likewise, by providing better and more consistent insights, ProductOps helps to support product teams’ decision-making processes so they ladder up to business growth outcomes. For instance, in a major financial services project I worked on, we focussed a lot of energy on creating the right structure around the research and testing process. This helped the team filter out the best ideas to ensure that what we delivered was high impact.
ProductOps can also help arbitrate decisions, which is especially helpful in more ‘political’ situations with clashes between teams or priorities.
Optimising tooling and ways of working
Consistency in teams’ ways of working – tools and the processes for using them – is often blocked by legacy systems and silos. ProductOps can help with these challenges, says Sam Nixon, Head of Wealth Product & Propositions at Aviva. “A process may be working for one group and not for another – so who has the right to change it?”
By streamlining how teams work – and taking the political tension out of these choices – ProductOps can boost efficiency and product outcomes.
Two ways to incorporate ProductOps into your organisation
1. Embed outside experts in your team
There’s only a small pool of ProductOps specialists, but the area is growing.
I have seen time and time again with clients across various industries and sizes that product studios excel at creating tactical focus on ProductOps. Temporarily embedding experts in your teams is an easy way to unlock growth through efficiency.
Akshat Adani, Product Lead (Voice) at Miko, a former colleague of mine, thinks that “using a product agency for ProductOps is a great idea. They bring an external perspective, evaluate everything, optimise it and then can make an exit.”
2. Combine existing teams and roles to create a ProductOps team
It can be faster and easier for organisations looking to build the discipline in-house to pull members from different teams – one person from data analytics, one from customer success, and one from products teams, for instance – to establish a dedicated ProductOps team. This combination of expertise brings credibility and access to data, a focus on the customer and a balance of these areas with business needs.
“You can’t deliver good products without a successful operational foundation, and I don’t think many stakeholders recognise that,” Falotico says. “So whether it’s hiring someone new or diversifying your team enough so they can become this Product Ops powerhouse for a time, it’s exciting that companies are realising that ProductOps is an important piece to the puzzle.”
There are still growing pains like the practical and political challenges of integrating ProductOps into existing product teams and workflows. Teams can become much more efficient by thinking more intentionally about the role ProductOps can play. Better understanding the problems that your product team is facing, and being proactive and structured in solving those problems, can unlock the growth that you have been looking for in your product.