Sunday Rewind: Understanding product ops with Taylor Belchak

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This week’s Sunday Rewind takes us back to a 2022 #mtpcon London digital breakout session in which Taylor Belchak, then Product Operations Lead at Deliveroo, discusses product operations and why they are essential to business success.

She says that product operations develop with business growth - as an organisation scales, simple tasks become full-scale critical work streams and product managers can’t give dedicated time to operation and development. Product operations can free up product management time.

While the role and structure of product operations varies across companies, there are some consistent themes for all product operations teams, as follows:

Standardise - build and simplify standards within the products with product documentation, feedback mechanisms, requirement gathering and roadmapping.

Communicate - build awareness of product roadmaps and progress with a communication strategy for a consistent and reliable source of product updates and customised communication methods for different audiences.

Launch and maintain products - the product should be launch ready and the product operations process addresses any issues that can occur post-launch.

Taylor advises that product operations teams should be open to simplifying working methods and that they should “nail it and then scale it”. They should also know when to let things break.

Understanding product ops with Taylor Belchak