Understanding the role of product ops

Christine Itwaru, a long-time product operations leader at Pendo who moved into product ops from product management, explains what the product ops role is, why it has emerged, and how it differs from PM, program management, and product marketing. The conversation also covers voice-of-customer work, tooling, internal transparency, career paths into product ops, and how one team is structured.

01Key learnings

• Product ops can be understood two ways: as a set of systems that help a product team thrive, and as a dedicated person or group that partners with PMs and advises product leaders.
• Common product ops responsibilities include voice-of-customer synthesis, tooling and data integrations, content and education strategy, and sometimes streamlining the planning process.
• Frame the role to PMs as protecting their time for customer conversations, which Christine says PMs should never give up, rather than as a threat to their ownership.
• Secure buy-in from the CEO or CPO first by articulating what the product ops role will drive, and measure its success with clear outcomes in the job description.
• Build transparency between sales, customer success, and product by pulling cross-functional teams together to share feedback, and use surveys to measure where PM and revenue team time goes.
• Good product ops work means standing up systems and then getting out of the way so people can focus on strategic work; be comfortable letting go of tasks as the company evolves.
• Product ops leaders are most effective when they have hands-on product experience; candidates should look for roles with defined success metrics and consider whether they enjoy solving problems through systems and team health.
• Bringing engineers into customer conversations builds empathy and can meaningfully change how the team plans and prioritizes.

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.