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Product operations is the function that makes everything around the PM work better - the systems, processes, data flows, and tooling that let product teams spend more time on actual product work and less time on coordination overhead 🔧 It’s a relatively new discipline. Most companies didn’t have a dedicated product ops function five years ago. As product organisations scaled and the complexity of running multiple teams in parallel grew, the need became obvious.

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What product ops actually does

The scope varies by company, but the core responsibilities typically include: Research and insights infrastructure - making sure customer feedback, usage data, and research findings are captured, organised, and accessible to the teams who need them. Without this, every team reinvents the wheel and insights get lost in Slack threads. Tooling and process - owning the product management toolset (roadmap tools, backlog systems, analytics platforms), and designing the processes teams use for discovery, prioritisation, and planning. Metrics and reporting - building the dashboards and reporting cadences that give teams visibility into what’s working. Defining what gets measured and how. Cross-team coordination - managing dependencies between teams, running planning ceremonies, and ensuring alignment without creating bottlenecks 💡

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Why it matters

Without product ops, this work still gets done - it just gets done badly and by PMs who should be spending that time with customers. A senior PM spending half their week wrangling data exports and updating stakeholder decks is an expensive way to do operations. Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles lay out the case in Product Operations - the function exists to amplify what product teams can do, not to add process for its own sake.

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When you need it

A team of three PMs probably doesn’t need a dedicated product ops person. A product organisation of fifteen across multiple product lines almost certainly does. The signal that you need it: PMs are spending significant time on coordination, tooling, and data wrangling that could be systematised. Lesson learned: the best product ops people I’ve worked with were invisible in the best possible way - the systems just worked, the data was always there, and the PMs had no idea how much coordination was happening in the background 🙌