Product Operations is the discipline of helping product management scale. It surrounds product teams with the essential inputs they need to set strategy, prioritize effectively, and streamline how work gets done.

As companies grow, product management breaks down. Strategy disconnects from execution. Teams silo. Customer insights disappear into slide decks no one reads. Collaboration evaporates into competing priorities.
 

Product Operations solves this by creating the infrastructure that lets product teams focus on building the right things rather than fighting for the information they need to make decisions.
 

The Three Pillars of Product Operations
 

Product Operations rests on three foundational pillars that address the most common scaling challenges:
 

Business and Data Insights:
Product teams need access to metrics that connect what they build to business outcomes. Product Ops creates the dashboards, reporting cadences, and data infrastructure that surface the right information at the right time. This includes connecting financial metrics to software delivery, tracking product health indicators, and enabling data-driven prioritization.
 

Customer and Market Research:
Scaling companies struggle to maintain closeness to customers. Product Ops systematizes how customer feedback flows to product teams, ensuring insights from sales calls, support tickets, and user research inform roadmap decisions rather than getting lost in departmental silos.
 

Process and Governance:
As product organizations grow, they need consistent ways of working without bureaucratic overhead. Product Ops establishes planning cadences, roadmap formats, prioritization frameworks, and cross-functional rituals that create alignment without slowing teams down.
 

When Do Companies Need Product Operations?
 

Product Operations typically becomes essential when organizations hit certain inflection points:

• The product team grows beyond 15 to 20 people and informal coordination no longer scales.

• Leadership asks questions about product performance that no one can answer quickly.

• Product managers spend more time gathering information than using it.

• Multiple teams start building conflicting roadmaps or duplicating work.

• Go-to-market teams and product teams operate with different assumptions about priorities.

Companies like Sam's Club, OpenAI, Stripe, Uber, and athenahealth have implemented Product Operations to solve these exact challenges.

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Product Operations vs. Product Management
 

Product Operations does not replace product management. It enables it.

Product managers own discovery, strategy, and delivery for their products. Product Operations creates the environment where product managers can do that work effectively by removing operational friction and providing the inputs they need.

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Think of it this way: Product managers decide what to build. Product Operations ensures they have the information, tools, and processes to make those decisions well.
 

Product Operations and the Product Operating Model
 

The Product Operating Model is the broader framework that defines how your organization creates and delivers product value. It encompasses strategy, structure, roles, decision rights, and ways of working. Product Operations is the function that makes that model run. Think of the Operating Model as the blueprint and Product Operations as the team that keeps the building systems working. You can design a great operating model on paper, but without operational infrastructure to support it, execution falls apart.
 

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Read the Book

I wrote the book on Product Operations with Melissa Perri. It covers implementation roadmaps, team structures, case studies from leading companies, and practical guidance for standing up the function at any scale.