Sunday Rewind: Whose job is it anyway? The rise of Product Ops and why it deserves to be an independent function

This week’s Sunday Rewind is a 2022 post from product coach Antonia Landi that examines product ops, what it is, how to hire for it, and how it is the ticket to your company’s success.

Antonia says product ops means different things to different people, and this ambiguity is its superpower. A product ops person at a startup might focus on process introduction, while someone at a large corporation might examine cross-departmental communication. A company with low product-led maturity will need someone with product management expertise to guide and coach product managers or offer support with OKR definition, while some companies might never need product ops at all.

It’s important to make a clear distinction between product ops and product work. Product ops should never call the shots, but help facilitate tough discussions and decisions. Outcomes will always be the responsibility of the people doing the actual work.

Antonia says that while Marty Cagan has argued that product ops is a symptom of poor product leadership, he fails to recognise that it’s about allowing leadership to do their best work. She says: “Without product ops you run the risk of having leadership who are so knee-deep in vendor negotiations and tool roll-out that they haven’t had time to think about market dynamics and what this could mean for the product as a whole. You create leaders who are so bogged down with process work that there is simply no room for real product leadership.”

A lack of product ops can lead to ineffective teams and poor leadership so Antonia concludes that eventually every organisation will need product ops.

Antonia closes by saying she wishes she had had product ops when she was a product manager: it would have enabled her to focus solely on the problem at hand instead of having to run around to fetch things (like product data, research information, experimentation results) that  she believed to be table stakes for her to do her job well. 

Whose job is it anyway? The rise of Product Ops and why it deserves to be an independent function