Product Ops: The 4 Foundations of Strategic Partnership

Imagine your first day in product ops. You walk in, you ask, right, where's the operating model? And they hand you a pile of jigsaw pieces, no box, no picture on the lid, just chaos. That is the job.

And let that sink in. Because most people get this wrong from day one. I'm Ross Webb. And after years working with product teams at Amazon, Just Eat and Beyond, I've seen what separates the product ops people who become a strategic partner from the ones who become a glorified admin.

Today, four operators show you the four corners of the jigsaw, the foundations of strategic partnership, voice of customer, stakeholder management, data analytics, and prioritization. Get these four right and you stop reacting. You start leading. This episode of Product Team Success is brought to you by Airfocus by Lucid.

Product teams are shipping faster than ever, But speed without direction is just a faster way to build the wrong thing. AirFocus is the structured foundation that keeps strategy intact as you scale. So your team always knows what to build and why. Find out more at airfocus.

com now. Back to the jigsaw. Today, four guests give you the four corners. First, Leonora Meany is going to break down how to organize the chaos by treating your internal teams as your customers.

Then Kristen Reals reveals the roadshow, the stakeholder listening tour that turns complaints into outcomes. Then Matthew Kanawati shows you how to take raw analytics and turn them into stories that drive executive decisions. And finally, Jason Lott lands the plane on why clarity, through documentation, is the single biggest gift you can give a busy product team. Four corners, one picture.

Let's build it. Corner one, voice of customer. But here's the twist most people miss. When you're in product ops, your customer isn't the user paying for the product.

It's the product manager, the UX team, the leadership team. They're the ones consuming what you build. So how do you organize the chaos for them? Leonora.

I feel product operations comes in and we have to look at something and we get like a massive brain dump of everything that is going on at the company. And we do have to organize chaos. around what is going on at the company. Like I said earlier in my intro, it is like doing a jigsaw piece.

Everything will just get dumped on the table and then you have to go, okay, priorities. How are you going to do this jigsaw? Are you going to do the outline first? Are you going to pick a specific bit of the picture?

What are you going to do? And then you have to think about the priorities around that And I think you can see the benefit of when you have a really good product operations person come into a company and they able to like weave those priorities into what is going on within the company because obviously the company is still going straight ahead they're still plowing on they're still carrying on with everything that they're doing and product operations has to go okay if they're going that way I'm gonna have to like weave in there and then do that bit there and then weave in there and do that bit there and try and figure everything out while everyone is still full steam ahead obviously going on with their priorities and your priorities aren't the same as their priorities it's then having to align everything to that I don't have a framework well I guess I guess I do I think the framework that I kind of use is talking to as many people as I can when you first join a company or you first get put on a project or you get given okay you've got to sort this out I think talking to as many people as you can and then trying to highlight based off of those conversations what the main priority should be it's like doing our own customer discovery is that is the way I do pictures people I will do my own customer discovery and the customers are the product managers the UX teams all that jazz the leadership teams, whoever it is, they are the customers because the end product is going to be delivered to them, essentially to help them be more efficient, move things along a lot quicker.

Brilliant. And that phrase, I will do my own customer discovery. That's the move right there. You don't wait to be told what's broken.

You go and find out, which leads us perfectly into corner two, stakeholder management. Because once you've decided your PMs and leaders are your customers, you have to actually go and listen to them, not survey them, not slack them, go to them. Kristen Reels calls this the roadshow, and it changes everything. So first, one of my favorite things to do, and I've done this when I've been in a lot of different roles, the first thing I like to do is go on a roadshow.

Go identify who are the leaders or I would even say the advocates in different business units and go have a conversation with them and start with, hey, I'm just here to listen to you and understand more about your world and what you're working on. What are the things you really love about your role? What are the things that are going really well with your team? And what are the pain point areas?

And then specifically, what are the pain point areas for working with product management or any of our product teams right And just lead with hey I here to listen I just want to hear you out I want to understand what you going through And that kind of goes back to that Leading with empathy First things first I want to know who you are I'm making a proactive effort to go identify who you are and have a conversation. You know what? Tell it like it is. Let's be honest.

Put it all on the table, right? And then you get to learn more about their business and understand how to be a good partner. But B, you're typing the initiative. And that goes a long way with people.

That last line, it goes a long way with people, banging the drum on that one. Listening is the entry point, not the destination. So once you've listened, once you've collected the chaos, you've got to make sense of it. And the way you do that is with data, but not data for data's sake.

Data that tells a story senior leaders can act on. Corner three, Matthew Kanawati. I think what becomes very interesting is that once we've analyzed, once we've kind of done the analysis, it's really the storytelling component that's sort of the most gratifying part for me. That's the part where it all comes together.

And that's kind of the part that I guess kind of makes it worth it at the end of the day for me. And what that looks like is taking all that raw data and all that analytics and cleaning it up into a really insightful narrative. whether that's a dashboard, a spreadsheet, an executive report, maybe it's a few slides. The medium will change depending on the context.

But we know that we've done this really well if we are conflicted with YouTube record, right? So firstly, are we equipping decision makers with the right data? Are we generating alignment between product and executive leaders? And are we enabling quick and precise decisions that will actually drive the right product outcomes?

Decision makers, alignment, quick and precise decisions. That's the output of good product ops. But here's where it all comes apart for most teams. You can do the discovery, you can do the listening, you can build the dashboards, and your product managers will still be drowning.

Why? Because confusion is a tax, and the way you remove that tax is the fourth and final corner. Clarity through documentation. Let's join Jason Lott and Clarity as a Service.

Yeah, I think part of the reason that we put so much emphasis on internal documentation is that confusion is a time suck for people in the product department. Product managers are so busy. The thing that they need, I think, most from their product ops team is clarity. And I was just having the discussion with one of my colleagues the other day, and I said clarity just removes that unnecessary choice off of somebody plate Rather than them having to make a choice or figure something out you can just tell them very explicitly this is the process that we follow or this is the cadence that we would expect you to provide update on what's happening with your roadmap, for example.

And so just getting all of that documented, detailed and written down, and then also thinking about ways that it is easy to navigate so everything is discoverable by the team and they don't have to hunt down the resources that they need. So with my team, we often talk about just looking at, it's not just writing this down, but how are we going to make sure that people can find this? How are we going to elevate it to the team through internal communications? And we might need to repeat that message multiple times so people really understand that this is how we do those things.

Right. Let's land the plane. Four corners of the jigsaw, four foundations of strategic partnership. One, Leonora.

Do your own customer discovery and treat your internal teams as the customer. Two, Kristen. Get out from behind your desk and run a roadshow, but always close with what's the next step? Three, Matthew, analytics is the easy part.

Your job is the story that drives the decision. Four, Jason, clarity is the gift. Documentation isn't bureaucracy. It removes choices off a busy PM's plate.

That's not admin work. That's strategic partnership. And if you build those four foundations, you stop being seen as overhead and you start being seen as a multiplier. This episode of Product Team Success is brought to you by Airfocus by Lucid.

Product teams are shipping faster than ever, but speed without direction is just a faster way to build the wrong thing. Airfocus is the structured foundation that keeps strategy intact as you scale. So your team always knows what to build and why. Find out more at airfocus.

com. So here's what to do next. Smash that subscribe button. We've got the rest of the series coming where we go beyond the foundations into how you scale this and prove the value.

Connect with all four guests on LinkedIn. They're absolutely the kind of people you should be learning from. And if you want to actually do the work alongside other product ops people who get it, come and join us inside the Top Prods community. Real cohorts, real coaches, real outcomes.

Big thanks again to our friends at Airfocus for backing this episode and backing the ProductOps community. From me, Ross Webb, until next time, bye for now.