Product management vs product operations
If you have been paying attention to articles, videos, or job openings published about tech companies or product development you probably have noticed a tick-up in the number of times that product operations or product ops are mentioned.
What’s the difference between Product Management and Product Ops?
Product management is the process of discovering, defining, executing, and bringing to market a product. This includes user and market research, product strategy, product development, and product launch. Product managers are responsible for the product’s overall success and work closely with their squad, aka cross-functional team, typically composed of product managers, designers, engineers, and data scientists or engineers. In certain companies, this team might include other disciplines like customer success, documentation, or marketing.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Product operations (or ProdOps) take their name from DevOps, so as the name suggests they focus on setting and improving the operations related to the product. Their focus typically is on helping and enabling to run that cross-functional team as smoothly as possible. They do this by improving processes, alignment, and communication. In some cases, they can also help and coach teams about best practices in product management.
If you want to know more about Product Operations check out this video.
What are their responsibilities?
Product manager’s (PMs) responsibilities are quite obviously centered around identifying problems and building products that solve them:
Product vision and strategy: PMs work starts in product discovery, they need to be able to identify the problems that users have, identify which user personas have that problem, and validate the potential solutions, via MVPs. This is an iterative process that will allow them to understand what is that potential product they can build. Once this is understood they should work on defining the vision of this product, you know that “how is product x going to make the world a better place” which although it has been quite abused is good to explain how is our product going to better people’s lives.
Customer centricity: as a PM you need to be focused on solving users’ problems or needs, no matter if you are in a B2B or B2C product. You can do this in many ways: doing user research to validate your assumptions on the problems you will solve. Interviewing and getting feedback from those users, empathizing with them. Analyzing their behavior when using your products, with insights and analytics.
Product execution: most of the time as a PM you will spend in product execution. This means working with your cross-functional team to build those prototypes, MVPs or features that will be deliver to your customers.
Team work: and often overlooked part of being a PM. PMs don’t work in silos, they are part of that cross-functional team or squad, and as such, they need to lead the vision of the product. They are not the only leads of the team, typically this is shared with a design lead and a tech lead.
Product optimization: once a product is released to the users, the longest part of the work for the PMs start: fine tunning, opening it to new markets, improving the capabilities, keeping the product simple and stable over the years.
Product Operations Managers (POMs) on the other hand focus on how to get that product done, by enabling the teams to do their job:
Product runs smoothly: as a POM you would work on defining what are the workflows that need to be verified that are working so that no unexpected changes in behavior or performance are added to the product.
Ways of working: POMs do a somehow similar job to a scrum master when helping the team with their job (in this case for the cross-functional team and not the engineering team), so as a POM you will establish the ways of working, meetings cadence, communication channels and frameworks to adopt.
Tooling: you will also work in defining the toolset that is going to be used by the team, for example, for roadmapping, documenting, or planning.
Enabling cross-functional work: one of the main tasks as a POM will be to help all the different disciplines work together, not only within the squad, but also working with business units, such as sales, customer success, and marketing.
So do you need both in your company?
So at a glance product manager would be focused on the customers, finding their needs, and working with them to build the products that will solve their needs. A product operations manager, on the other hand, would be more focused on developing ways of working in the team. And although this differentiation is pretty clear, it will depend quite much on how the company operates, and some activities that could be taken by product managers might be driven by the product operations manager, for example, driving the definition of KPIs for the product.
It could be easily confused the role of a product operations manager with the ones taken in the past by project managers, who used to drive a new version of the product and make sure that it was developed on time, within budget and scope. But product operations are typically established in product-led companies, where the product and being customer-centric are the focus.
So do you need both roles in your company, it depends. If you are in a small company my answer is no, the role that is taken by the POM can be taken by a PM, or the different PMs you have in the company, is still easy for a team of five or fewer PMs to work together, discuss and agree on common practices and tools. When your company scales up, specially at a rapid pace, then where I think that POMs make a lot of sense. When Product teams become large, having a dedicated team to keep those common practices will help the company, this doesn’t mean that all the teams need to work exactly in the same way and the same sets of tools. But having a product operations team, will help you having more even results on how the teams are performing.
