3 years of Product Ops, A Lookback

How do we keep Product orgs open to change?

Product moves fast, the last decade has been a continuous stream of calls to move faster, and the last 3-5 years especially have seen dramatic changes in the methodologies, tools, and strategic approaches to Product teams (whether the people in those roles want those changes or not). My last 6 years has been spent at a startup that scaled over an order of magnitude (X,000 customers -> X0,001+) with just over 3 of those years in Product Ops helping to support our leadership, our IC's, and the department itself. During this time we succeeded, we stumbled, and we learned; learned not just new skills or new principles to follow, but how to navigate growth and change altogether.

How do you keep people focused on work rather than bureaucracy?

My team was incredibly small—a force of 4; small, but mighty, as we said—and our task was to support not just individual IC's, managers, and teams with unique and niche interests, but to focus on the way that a department of 400 would work together, could work together. When it didn't make sense for a leader to be doing something, we stepped up to the plate; and when it didn't make sense for us to do something, with our incredibly constrained capacity, we had to find a way to operationalize, automate, and scale everything that came our way.

How do I keep people engaged with a process I'm sterilizing?

For all the wins, all the learnings, and all the time spent honing my craft, this mountainous task has left me not just with a deep understanding of how Product teams work but also with a deep well of questions. What does a healthy product ops team look like? How do you sustain acceleration of Product work? How do you cut through the noise of AI and how do you leverage and secure the benefit of it?

I'll be adding more insights about these areas, sharing my own work, and more. So if you'd like to be in the know, then please stay in touch! I'd love to hear what you think -- the old school way, or the professional way.