Denise Tilles is an experienced product leader, consultant, and coach who has spent her career helping organizations transform opportunity into product vision. She specializes in product strategy, organizational design, and product operations. Denise joins Melissa Perri on this week’s episode to argue strongly in favor of the need for Product Operations as organizations start to scale.
Show Notes
Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Denise talk about in this episode:
How Denise got started in the field of product operations.
Denise and Melissa explain why they strongly disagree with Marty Cagan’s recent post characterizing Product Ops as simply “process people.” Product ops helps organizations actually scale, and helps teams inform, deploy, and monitor their product strategy.
There are three tenets of product operations: business and data insights, customer and market research, and processes and practices. Processes and practices concerning areas of product management are especially important as they allow teams to get the work done. Clear roadmaps prevent individuals within organizations from working in silos and contribute to a healthy product culture.
Many organizations have lots of differing styles of roadmaps that make it difficult to reconcile critical decisions. What they should be doing instead, Melissa says, is have processes in place that standardize strategic decision-making with clarity and transparency. Denise remarks that these aspects of product management are being left to the wayside, putting unreasonable expectations on product managers and that that needs to change.
Product operations teams are very powerful in that they help product leaders think about how they are measuring, what they are doing consistently, and how they can be truly transformative. Product ops is about enabling product leaders and managers to make decisions.
When looking for a product analyst, you need to hire someone who’s great at crunching the numbers and more importantly, good at extracting actionable insights. You need a diplomatic person who can help product managers understand how and why the data is being used by the product team.
Denise and Melissa talk about democratizing customer research. It puts time back into the product manager’s hands so they can focus on more important matters.
Product managers often don't focus on the market research, but to understand different trends, or how the market is moving, they need to.
The skillsets of product ops people have to be diverse because product ops has three disparate functions. “You're not going to hire the same type of person as a product ops person across this entire area. It's more about really figuring out what you need in each one of those cases and then going from there,” Melissa says.
Resources Denise Tilles | LinkedIn | Twitter Produx Labs
Episode Transcript
Melissa: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the product thinking podcast. Today, we are going to be talking about product operations and I'm joined by my co author of our new product operations book. That's coming out, Denise Tilles.
Denise: Hello. How are you, Melissa?
Melissa: I'm doing good. Good to chat with you about this Denise.
Denise: Yes, I love talking about it.
Melissa: For our audience, before we dive in, do you want to give a little background on yourself and what you've been doing with product operations?
Denise: Yeah. Um, I have been in product for over 10 years. Most of that on the operating side, and I actually experienced product operations firsthand when I was VP of product at a B2B SaaS, wasn't really called product ops in, but really saw firsthand the power that it brings to a product team. And since then kind of realized, oh, that's what we were doing, product operations. So I'm really excited to sort of share that with other teams and other companies. I've been doing that for the past year and a half as a consultant and coach.
Melissa: Great. Yeah, I'm pretty passionate about this topic too. And I think, you know, through our workout products, labs, uh, you and I both seen it work really, really well at a variety of companies, uh, growth stage through the enterprise. And to me, this is like the glue that makes product management scale and makes it work.
So I was pretty surprised to read an article by Marty Cagan, and that came out yesterday from, uh, when we're recording this on help product ops as a joke. And he talks about how it's just process people to know you feel the same way, but, uh, I wanted to jump on this podcast, uh, you know, with you to talk through this because I, one, I'm a little, I'm a little annoyed by this post, honestly, because I think it's vilifying a whole entire subset of product management in a career that people have. There are directors of product operations.
There are VPs of product operations. There are tons of product ops people out there doing amazing work to make sure that product operations can help the chief product officers and help organizations actually skill. And Marty's kind of writing it off as, you know, just process and people who are like over optimizing, uh, for, you know, scaling process and making sure that everything process is optimized.
And that's not what I've seen. No,
Oh, not at all. And there's some really big companies that have introduced product operations of scale, like Stripe and Pendo Calendly amplitude I could go on. So there's a lot of really important companies that see the value of this and continue to invest in it. So I was surprised too.
Melissa: Yeah. Like I, so let's maybe break down what we believe is product operations for the audience. Um, so let's, for those of you who didn't read the article yet, it's called process people on the spg.com blog. Um, and Marty kind of lays out that he's seen at organizations that people who are called product op uh, product operations, people, uh, are being hired in massive amounts into these organizations to really dictate the different processes around specific roles, like product owners and scrum masters, and, you know, kind of almost get into almost like what the agile at scale people are doing.
Right. How do I keep dictating the product management processes and they're treating process like a religion. Uh, and so he's basically saying product operations is a joke. So, so what, so what do we kind of see product operations as, um, we believe there's three core tenants of a product operations and Denise w so how would we outline those three things?
Yeah.
Denise: Well, I love the way that you framed it. So succinctly, yesterday, it was just it's around helping teams in forum and deploy and monitor their product strategy. And how do we support teams with the best inputs toward that? Right. So it's three tenets, really three pillars, right? So business and data insights, the quantitative customer and market research, the qualitative and processes and practices.
And, you know, when you think about processes and practices, it's not sort of a Dick tot that has to be a certain way across a large organization. It's more about just the supporting aspects. Uh, someone told me they, they consider it methods, right? So just enough, enough process around certain, um, areas of product management to support the teams that they're not spending precious cycles thinking about how do we work together, but let's get the work done.
Right. So I see this a lot with roadmaps. What's the template we're using? How are we deploying it? How are we working with our cross-functional stakeholders? And I've seen really large organizations get tripped up in this and people end up working in silos and it can really start contributing to a damaged culture.
Melissa: Yeah. I think that's a huge part of it. And to me, that's the process piece that, you know, Marty is kind of getting at, but, uh, the teams that he seen doing this, I just think they're doing it wrong. Uh, we, we really talk about like, how do you standardize the things that cut across different teams and cut across different units of the organization?
So like you said, how do we standardize roadmap so that we don't have 40 different roadmaps? Like, we've both seen chief product officers. We've, we've been in this position before, right. Like you and me, when we come in and try to like set strategy at these organizations, uh, you walk in, you say, what's going on?
Where are the roadmaps? And somebody gives you like 50 different types of roadmaps. And you're like, wow, okay. So this is a completely different level, um, you know, initiative from this level and this other roadmap.
And wow, this one is organized, not the same way that this one is. And where are the goals of metrics on that one? Uh, and when you try to reconcile those types of things, you don't have the transparency into what's going on in the organization to be able to make critical product decisions, uh, that will impact your strategies.
So I feel like when we talk, you know, servicing, uh, process, like when we talk about creating process in organizations or, uh, standardizing these different types of artifacts, or figuring out a cadence for reviewing strategy in these processes, uh, you know, we're not talking about overdoing it, um, or like being like, oh my God, this is the way your backlog must look at. Like, yeah. Um, but we, we talk about it as like, how do we make sure that this process enables us to make strategic decisions and have clarity and transparency into what we do?
Denise: Exactly. And when I work with companies and come in there and take a look at whether they have product operations enabled, or they're thinking about it, it's the type of processes that get left by the wayside. And, and, um, I was looking at a, uh, article that, uh, shrin Abbas from Calendly had, um, put out recently ended up podcast.
And, um, you know, it's around having the empathy for the product manager. We're asking them to be ever more, you know, almost octopus, like, you know, be commercial, be strategic, you know, be very technical, make sure you're delivering. And there's just more and more we're putting on product managers and product offices.
Aren't having empathy to help support them and enable them. So the things that I tend to see falling by the wayside are really important aspects of product management. You can call them process or not.
Right. So the practices, speaking to customers, I'll come in and work with a company like, oh, we're talking to customers, they're joining sales calls every week. So this is almost like a, do you want fries with that kind of conversation versus tell me about how you're using this. Tell me about what your problems are.
Let's talk about how you're actually using this consistent inputs of data. Yes, we're data-driven will show me what that looks like. Oh, well, it's really hard to get it and we don't have it instrumented. So you just dig a little bit deeper at these kinds of things that really need to be enabled to help support product managers just don't exist.
Templates. We talked about being more experiment experimental. What does that look like? Well, we don't really have time for that. We're not really sure how to do it. We have user research, but they're backed up. So it just doesn't get done. I could go on. So there's a lot of things that if we can just put a little bit of process and support around really can kickstart these PM's into really focusing on the things that matter the strategy that enables customer value and business growth.
Melissa: Yeah. I completely agreed. I like what you're saying. It's all about enablement here. And I think that even more critical part of product operations that, you know, we don't really, we're talking about process right now, but, you know, we, we think of these three areas as, you know, getting internal data and surfacing it up to make strategic decisions, getting external data on our customers and their needs to help make strategic decisions in the processes that enable it. I think it's really the game changer for me when I've seen a lot of this is the data pieces, right? Both the internal and external.
Denise: Huge absolutely. Um, you know, I've worked with companies and been at companies where you get in. It's like, literally none of this is instrumented to the product. So it's like, okay, we've got to go back to not even, you know, step one, but step a, how do we get this instrumented to make sure we can start getting a baseline?
So that's going to take you quite a while. Um, I've seen many teams working around this, not even taking the time to stop and instrument the, um, uh, event tracking or whatever, uh, to be able to start measuring the quantitative inputs that should be informing your strategy. So, um, product ops is really, really powerful in this sense.
They're like, wait a minute, we've got to start with, how are we measuring this? How are we doing this consistently? And, um, it can really be transformative.
Melissa: Yeah. And I think this data thing, you know, it's such a game changer and especially for product leaders. So product operations is really about enabling product leaders to make decisions and product managers to make decisions. Um, so, you know, when a product leader comes into an organization or when they start as a new CPO, or even if they're there already, honestly, they just need this data to make decisions.
Uh, one thing that I hear from product managers all the time is that they don't have enough time. Like you said, they're like turning into these octopus people who are, who are doing too many things. And one of the big things that they do is, uh, try to get the data out of the systems because they didn't set up the systems to actually scale or provide the things they need.
Denise: Exactly. And sometimes it's a matter of someone having a sort of, um, a hundred foot view in saying all of this exists in this company, but how do we harness it? Right. So, um, it doesn't necessarily have to be created from the ground up, but it's about making sure that these resources and these data inputs are harnessed and put together with that product lens to help support the product managers to be as strategic as they can to focus their work on the company strategy and vision, and just making sure that you're aligning to that value. It really comes back to that value customer value and business value.
Melissa: Exactly. So maybe we'll just leave you with a couple companies that we see doing this well. Um, and then you can tune in for when the book is out. You want to be notified when it launches go to product operations.com and sign up for the mailing list. And we will, we will tease you with some little, little things up until it launches. Um, but you know, I, I could think of a couple off the top of my head, Denise, and then you chime in too, but we talked about Calendly. We talked about athenahealth Pendo Stripe. Uh, what other ones have we seen this way?
Denise: The they've got a great guy there. Um, who came from Uber, who's really doing a lot of good stuff. Um, we're seeing, you know, they're like you mentioned, I can't really say the name yet, but a large retailers is planning to, um, add probably close to a team. So that's a little different from the one by one by one. Um, we've seen a lot of different companies and not just B2B, you've seen it at, um, B to C as well. It's really across the board a Facebook, I believe as well. Um, has that, so it's really, it's across the spectrum of different types of companies. So it's not a religion, it's not a process. It is enablement.
Melissa: Exactly. And I think that's the point here. So that's our views on product operations. So Marty, we'd welcome a dialogue with you on this, but I think you just haven't seen people do it well, and I think you'd be really impressed if you did. So I agree that there's probably some people out there not doing product operations well, but we see so many people who are, and Denise and I firmly believe that this is something that really helps you scale.
It's not just, you know, processed, hungry people over there, like agile coaches trying to optimize this stuff. It's really about enabling product leadership and enabling product managers to make the right decisions, to really inform your strategy, monitor your strategy and deploy your strategy throughout your organization. Like that's what we see is the powerful force.
So we hope, uh, everybody on here will read our book when it comes out, product operations.com. If you want to get ahead of it. And then Denise also teaches workshops on product operations, um, throughout the year. So if you go to products, labs.com and go to training, you can see when ones are coming up.
She just taught one yesterday. So, uh, always teaching good PM 1 0 1 at PM limit scratch up, always teaching good product ops, uh, workshops on this stuff as well. Great. Thanks Melissa. It's a really great conversation. Yeah. Thanks for joining me, Denise. Uh, and we look forward to seeing you scratch it.
I didn't say anything good. We're there. So thanks everybody go back. I was like, so thank you so much to these for joining me. This has been a really fun topic of conversation. I know we're both passionate about it. I'll just close it out. I'll just close it out. So definitely keep an eye out for workshops that are coming up and otherwise we will see you on the next step of the product thinking podcast that comes out every Wednesday.
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