Join Zoom Meeting ID: 93212861310 Passcode: 157848
Rough Agenda
- Everyone Intro + what brings you to this topic (unstructured thoughts and simple curiosity welcomed 🙂)
- TBC
Suggestions:
Add topics, Qs, ideas that come to mind around this theme here (start with your initials - ex. MP):
- MP: Ops to Product (what are the overlapping skills, how to make such transition, etc.)
- Product Ops
- Overlap
- next steps
Other comments:
- Add
Resources:
- Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (Silicon Valley Product Group) - by Marty Cagan (recommended by Amber, endorsed by Jon)
- Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard Hardcover – by Chip Heath (recommended by Hugo)
- John Cutler (https://medium.com/@johnpcutler, https://twitter.com/johncutlefish) (recommended by Jon, endorsed by Hugo)
- https://blog.usejournal.com/https-medium-com-kuldeepsalhan-making-work-visible-at-farfetch-476ddfcf10a9 - Farfetch approach (Hugo's company; shared by Hugo)
Notes:
AK
- ops working closely with the Product team → customer facing
- product operations - collaboration worked super well; but not much inside of how the magic happens behind the curtain of product development
- Operation Nation initiative & interested in product from that perspective
AV
- haven't stopped to think much about product
- hard to define Ops alone but adding a prefix like Product - Product Ops (becomes easier)
- A lot of Qs and wondering around what is POps etc...
- Senior Ops Role (helping a founder build a product) - need to understand what the product is
JB
- gone both sides (Product and Ops)
- digital product delivery (managing projects)
- working with clients (setting teams) - generalist roles; MD etc.
- MedTech start-up - Product Ops role (how do we get these teams working together to deliver product)
- scrum work - useful
- The connections are the important part when it comes to any Ops roles (joining the dots)
- product-centric company (everyone is product)
AH
- Work closely with CPO
- support squads on planning and discovery (across multiple verticals)
- understanding the evolution of that - building a Product Operations Team (team of 1 now)
- Specialising & hiring for Product Ops
- what to consider when building this function
HF
- graphic designer; digital design; Head of Creativity
- running teams and process
- UX design & strategies; service design (building design teams)
- Practices Team (4k people) → optimising for practices
- Product Ops Team - overarching the whole Product Team (more user centric; more efficient; no repetition) - goal - build a stronger product team
- meet more Product Ops People
How do you define Product Ops
- trend adding Ops at the end of disciplines
- not purely the function, more how do we do this Day to Day
- joining the dots
- where does a process need to exist
- moving the needle
Operations are the real "how"
How do you help the whole company organise your work
well-oiled machine
COO - join things together (on Tech and Product - they can be a bit out of the loop)
lift the carpet - pain-points - what is not working
- way to show value to the team
Product is being build whether you are there or not - so proving you can save time & money is the value
- experiment - trying to measure what time is spent on
- HF: Article LINK
- ex.: Calendar visibility; default to meetings, etc.
- mindset change → behaviour changes
Planning cycle - spent a lot of time on it
Different way of operationalising the squads
Get Product to communicate clearly the roadmap and why
Mind shift - more features vs focus
Writing culture - thinking through writing
Spending 2h of thinking - it is valuable work
Documentation
Manage change
Private vs Public
admitting you don't know something
a lot to overcome
TRUST - goes back to it
Find a group that is doing it well and use them as an example
Culture from the top
Psychological safety (has to come from the Senior Leadership Team)
Talking about change, here's a great book to read: https://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752
Middle Management - what of they don;t (if the SLT is but the Middle M doesn't) - transparency etc. → still has to come from the top; they have to keep them accountable; what is really important
- misalignment of incentives
- ex. Roadmap (do we accept it is fluid or are we judging them on delivery by a date)
Negative results - celebrating failures
- rushing through them vs learning
- war stories event - share war scars
- Retro (more on team level)
You should do it similarly across the board - so you can compare and have a baseline (delivery vs outcomes)
- how you measure things across the board
- anti-patterns
- Impact metrics
- solving problems vs revenue etc.
- com munication and clarity
What will be most useful next:
- Slack
- Topics (career ladder; team; scale) → not super frequently
- resource sharing
- collect some topics (group people around them)
- shout out about it
- speaker?
Aušrinė's notes:
- "Not a product ops person; was just thrown into it" - Amber
- "Want to meet more product ops people - there are so many but not enough!" - Hugo
- "In the early stages, we're building product as we go without knowing what the product management and/or operations is" - Mickey
- "Didn't know that product operations even exist!" - Mickey
- "Trend to add 'ops' to the end of everything - design ops, product ops, etc. Marking how we do this vs what we do." - Jon
- "Lift up the carpet; what's not working at the moment" - Hugo
- "If over 70% of the time is spent on non-planned work, why do we spend so much time on planning?" - Hugo
- "People don't protect their time enough." - Hugo
- "Delivery minded vs outcome driven" - Hugo
- "Introducing user impact metrics to try and shift the conversation a bit. Get to know your user!" - Hugo
- "Ops is attached to everything!" - Hugo
- What does "building a product operations team" mean?
- How do you operationalise your teams/squads?
/