speaking as a former PM I would not ever give up spending time with customers and watching their pain that's how I fell in love with product was I saw my internal customer 12 years back now fighting with the keyboard fighting with the mouse and I was just like oh my gosh
what's this guy doing welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products today my guest is Christine Edward Christine is a long time product Ops
leader at pendo a role that she transitioned into from product management I've been hearing more and more about the rise of product Ops and I've never really understood what the role was until I had this conversation with Christine we dig into what product Ops people do day to day where the line
is between their role and product management whether you should consider getting into the role whether your company would benefit from product Ops we also have an interesting discussion around whether Ops roles in general are a sign of inefficiency at your company I
learned a ton from this conversation and Christine is awesome and so with that I bring you Christine and waru after a short word from our wonderful sponsors this episode is brought to you by amplitude if you're setting up your analytics stack but not using amplitude
what are you doing anyone can sell you analytics while amplitude unlocks the power of your product and guides you every step of the way get the right data ask the right questions get the right answers and make growth happen to get started with amplitude for free visit amplitude.com amplitude power to your
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opportunity actively or passively join the collective the is free you can be anonymous and you can even hide yourself from specific companies you can also leave anytime and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from check out lennysjobs.com Talent Christine welcome to the podcast thank
you I'm so happy to be here Lenny first of all I just wanted to give a big thank you to Ben Williams who's a previous guest on this podcast who suggested you join this podcast and who connected us and we were chatting earlier and you said you have a story about Ben and so
what is that I do absolute thanks to Ben for connecting us so when he made the intro I was super excited one because it's you and two because I love hearing for bad and I was like oh great he's doing all these wonderful things and whatnot and I just remember in that moment
my first conversation with Ben which was really early in the days of starting product operations at pendo and we were going through all these just really crazy things that he was going through and his team as a customer of pendo at the time and he's like sitting there
just kind of staring and just I was like oh you're okay and he's like yeah I'm fine I thought I thought that I was just throwing them off at a return and he said to me you know I bet you I'm not the only person who has these questions and I bet you I'm not the only person
that's thinking about all these problems that probably seemed very normal and natural I don't I don't know I bet all of us are going through this is why I'm Building Product Ops here but what he said and he was just like I really think there are a lot more people that you need to talk to about this stuff so and
I was just so you know it's just kind of Full Circle right I think he connected us and and he was one of the reasons I started to say one of the best things that my my first Boston product always told me was you have to find a way to give back and when he said that to me I
was like I wonder if this is one of the ways that I can start to give back to the product community so awesome well here we are and obviously we're gonna be talking about product Ops you've been in the product Ops role for seemingly feels like as long as the role has existed I'd
love to know when you think the role actually and we're going to talk about just like when this kind of spurt happened in product Ops and I hate this term but it feels like you're kind of a thought leader in the product up space I've never actually worked with anyone
in product Ops I've never had a product Ops Team and so I have a ton of questions I imagine many people listening also haven't and are also just curious about this emerging role and so what I'm hoping we do with our chat is to help people understand do they need a product Ops Team would that be
beneficial to their company see whether people should consider moving into product Ops whether they're in PM or something else right now and then just generally helping people understand this emerging role of product Ops does that sound good yes thank you number one that
was really kind and two yes I'm happy to dive in yeah okay sweet so I think we have to start with the basics what's just like the simplest way to understand the role of product Ops and especially in relation to product management I've had many ways of describing this in the past and it generally centered
around the latter of what I'm going to tell you or the second part of this but I'm breaking it down now into two into two simple things one is it is a thing you do product operations for a VP or a head of product or a product manager is the creation of some sort of system that
allows you to thrive or allows your team to thrive in product management and the second is what we've seen more of over the last couple years and it's the more common definition it's the emergence of the rule itself is why it's so common it's a person or the people
the group of individuals who are strong Partners to the product manager and then for more mature product Ops teams end up people being more strategic advisors to the head of product so your CPO or your VP again when it comes to data qualitative quantitative anything that
they feel can help the CPR the head of product make more strategic decisions and well-informed decisions got it it feels like there's been this big inflection and emergence of the role in the past couple years past few years I'm curious what you think triggered that and if that's true if it feels like it's
just kind of emerged in the last couple years and yeah and then just like why do you think that has happened this is interesting because like as a former product manager and product leader I don't think that things are new absolutely and that's what I go back to the story about Ben it's like it I'm
like no like none of this stuff feels really interesting and you know it's just stuff that we have to deal with in product and so the problems have always been there I think maybe that is because I have a product background and so I felt that pain very acutely but I will
say for the majority of people always speak to who don't have that product background they're coming from consulting or from technical success or from some other group marketing maybe yeah it does feel relatively new because they're starting to dive into that space
a little bit but I will say that for me in particular at pendo it was the summer of 2019 that this really picked up and I remember a colleague of mine shout out to Shannon he's no longer with us but he was one of the original people on the kind of a product team he said you know
I think this is the summer the birth product tops and I started laughing and and he was like I'm telling you it's everywhere all of a sudden everybody's just like we need something we need to make product better and I thought that was awesome because we already started
talking about it right and so it took me a bit to understand what was going on across Tech that was making this thing so big and I'm very grateful because we have so many great customers that reach out and say help us understand how you're doing this and I'm like we'll
help you understand what's going on and so for me it went beyond the problems that we would solve as a product team with the pendo product it went into how can we help you as an organization solve pain that you're feeling within your product team that trickles out ultimate
business right that's interesting that it was the summer of product Ops what happened there why why was there summer of product Ops why is everyone starting to get excited and kind of creating product Ops teams yeah I'll dive in and it's like the customers customers started to come up and we started to
feel it a bit more and I felt like there was this huge need for voice of customer management and synthesis of both this qualitative and quantitative data as a theme that I saw a rising across our customer base or even just folks that were reaching out about this role as
they saw pindo was putting it down there was a lot of pain around internal alignment and general transparency to stakeholders uh up across your Revenue team members and then for a lot of people during this time growth was a massive propeller of the need for product Ops I remember just sitting here
in this office and getting these random every industry almost was like I'm thinking about doing this and I really need to do this pandemic robot it was growth during the pandemic especially within Industries such as home furnishings and making making their living space a whole lot better all of a
sudden we started to see that rise but we were all experiencing this massive amount of growth across some of these startups and and really rapidly grown companies and we're also moving more towards these product-led tactics uh product LED growth and all of these
things I feel like made this perfect storm for product operations to come in and sort of start calming things down I personally believe there's this Natural Evolution that happens in any mature function when it starts to grow in an industry and across an organization so
think about marketing or sales right this has started to happen with product managers and for me I was sitting there going well you can appoint a PM to liaise with other Ops teams in the business but at what risk right their product portfolio the growth and Adoption of their product all these
goals that they have to hit today in order to build a better tomorrow for their customers and so I feel like that was the moment to say okay how do we give them the structure that they needed to thrive right because the CPO is in charge of so much more than product
people have historically been in charge of right I'll probably talk about Marty Kagan several times here and I really do admire and respect him I think one of the things that he always talks about is future teams versus you know High performing teams and and focusing on
outcomes and cpos went from okay deliver deliver to really increase business metrics or you know just help Drive the bottom line versus just really look at the product and you really have to figure out what that means for the product the arch got it so the way to think about this role because I imagine
most people haven't ever had a product Ops person on their in their company is there's kind of like a slice of the PM role that companies are finding is valuable to put on a different person that has different skill sets they can take this like endless load that PMS
have like PMS have so many things to do and their job is so full of UH responsibilities yeah that there's this sliver of stuff that a product Ops person can take off I I'd be curious too and I feel free to comment on that but I'm also curious you mentioned a few
specific things that the product Ops folks do it'd be cool to just like go through a bullet list of just those sorts of things like you said kind of responsible for voice of the customer pieces alignment across stakeholders whatever like if you could just go through some of those that'd be that
makes it really concrete I think for people to understand oh wow this person I could have someone do all these for me that'd be amazing in some ways I've got this question a lot from product managers who are concerned about the rise of this role or product leaders who are concerned that
it was going to create some sort of controversy or friction between product apps people and product managers and the way I've coached people to get around that is really what are your people responsible for what are you holding them accountable to are you holding the
product manager accountable to elevating the Strategic insights so that they are going to elevate it to everyone else and then everyone else is going to go out there and build a thing and you know Drive the value or are you holding them accountable to truly understanding the
customer in in whatever way possible especially going on and talking to the customer please don't ever anybody ever take that credit um and really spending time with their engineers and the customers in order to drive a better experience right and so if they've got to spend all this time
which is our most valuable asset with those two entities everything else still has to do and so I think that yes there was a point of friction but I feel like now it's it's been a nice change where I'm seeing people I don't say no I want to do product Ops who was a former processor
and the second part of that you said let's go through the list of tactical things and yes voice of customer management is definitely one of the things that we're seeing more I would say I I don't want to say mature because then it I feel like I'm seeing mature you your Peak but the ones who have
matured a bit I feel like they are focusing more on the voice of customer elements so quantitative analysis qualitative bringing all of these different inputs that would traditionally be handled by product manager through you know looking across the aisle at their pmm or looking at
different data sources to the surface when they're going through their product development life cycle planning and really figuring out too what that balance is I think there's an art you can do voice of customer in two ways you can do it one in like this process way
where you're feeding it to a really mature long-standing product team who has mature product or you have this voice of customer thing that you have to do for for teams that are actually building something new and they're really trying to move fast so how do you really get them what they need in order
to experiment and iterate on the next thing that they're doing that's one aspect another one is tooling we see this more for folks who don't yet have tools under control in their product or announcing everybody has this right we we had someone at one point handle
whatever tools connected to pendo and make sure that those systems are set up for maximum outcomes for the product manager and so spendo is connected to Salesforce we're connected to looker we're connected to all these portray all these different you know and so what
does the product manager need to achieve out of all those things that ultimately drives our experience for pendo ourselves you get very meta here that person was responsible for that and that's all also a part of the data component the other things that we're seeing are
more along the lines of content strategy and being really intentional about making content and education a part of the product process right and the delivery process so taking a look at how they maximize the outcomes from the outcome that the product manager is driving so that they can help increase
retention growth and all of that good stuff for the product so those are some of the things that we're seeing and then there's also this component that happens or this piece of it that happens in the beginning when you're standing your product ups for a product team that does
not have much processing and that's the process piece and that's the bit that's a bit controversial because folks are like is this just program management is this just a different flavor of agile and so what we're seeing is this you know what are these folks doing are they
managing and facilitating the product development life cycle are they doing things with the rest of the organization so I feel like this one's a little bit up in the air some are actually agile facilitators as well but I am seeing emergence of some companies that have
the program management team under the product so umbrella to help with this massive amount of things that they have to manage across the board oh that's a really interesting point on the last piece I want to dig in on that a little bit just to summarize what you shared to
some of the kind of key roles of a product Ops person there's this voice of customer element and just understand what you mean by that or the team is aggregating feedback from customers and feedback from this customer support and sales and things like that and like sharing it
with the product manager to give them clear conclusions and like takeaways so that the PM doesn't have to sit there and filter those data is that is that a way to think about it that's one part of it we actually developed this really cool way of doing it here at pendo which
is the transparency is a word that we love here and what we found that there was just not this need for the revenue org to be transparent and say hey this is what we're hearing and product people please listen or vice versa like here's what we're doing for your customer there was this interesting moment where we
realized that our sales team was screaming for something and our success team was screaming for something else but our Tams were looking at something else right and so they're all wonderful relevant things that our customers wanted but we were like what if they're
aware that like they've got all these amazing things and they're kind of you know talking they're talking about it separately and RPMs they would get the whole readout you know with us but we probably those folks in a room together but it was really cool because it was like I think our head of our
Professional Services team at one point was like whoa like this can truly impact what we do from an onboarding perspective now we have this data and then how do we then strengthen this area in the product so it wasn't just about the components so I don't know if other
companies are doing it like that but I was very proud of the way we ended up doing that here but the PM yes got risk data high priority deals feedback from our feedback product what are we hearing from prospects versus paying customers what segments are saying what all that
stuff got fed over to the PM and then validated through our research team or disputed through our research team which is really cool this is a really good partnership with our research team but on the other side what was really nice too was we were able to educate our Revenue team on behalf of the product
team and say you know guys like not everything requires a product change so if you're saying there's customers that have friction around this one area this product maybe it's enabling maybe it's something that we need to help you guys and understand a little bit better so
that you can make their experience better or maybe when you talk to your presentation it's just very simple things like that that just ended up coming up this voice of customer process so essentially it's just finding ways to make the PM more focused and allow them
to focus on the things they want to focus on and reduce workload on the user research piece I'm curious so it feels like there's a lot of there's user research coming in PMS are involved in user research there's a research team where does the product Ops Team fit in there or is it focused on
like internal alignment stakeholder feedback more versus like external customer feedback yeah and you know again I'll say this probably several types is every company is doing it in their own little bit of flame reality event here and from a couple companies that I'm seeing outside of pendo our
user research team sits with our ux team they report into our head of ux and they are responsible for proactive research and making sure that we are aligning to our strategy right and saying okay here's here's what our folks are seeing here is why we're going after this
Market or this new thing that we're doing let's start going out there and validating or checking with some of these key personas right and what what we need to do and then they are also a part of the ongoing development process or product development process so you
know testing stuff out making sure that they're doing user your interviews and all that good stuff so they sit as a partner to us we work very closely together and again I'll give you that example of voice of customer which is we have all of this input coming in from
our customer success or post sales teams and we know we're about to invest in our guides area of the product we have all of this what do we do with it when we couple that with I'm personally responsible for NPS or I was for a very long time I'm seeing a lot of noise around guides so I take all of that we
pull it all together we give it to our head of research and say all right let's all make sense of all this together right is this something that is in line with the direction that the product team is going the guides team or is this something that we're going to need to
dig a little bit more into to see if their efforts right now where they're growing are not where they should be going the other two bullet points just to kind of make sure I totally understand uh you help with tooling the product Ops teams helps just like
optimize the tooling to build product right is that a simple way to think about just make sure the product development process is efficient yeah yeah we partner with the program management team and the tools that they use for product development stuff I would say it's more what are the things
that the product manager needs in order to be successful and so we look at pendo right we we do use our own product like I mentioned quite a lot Salesforce is another thing so how does that all plug into our own product and what data are we looking to get out of there so RPMs
have a complete picture in condo Trey is another one I mentioned zapier was another one that we could use so it's more about the PM's tool stack versus the PM's planning tool stack if you want to draw that distinction got it okay that is helpful and then content strategy way that you mean Internal
Documentation to train sales and customer support or is there also like help the product team build Out product marketing content and things like that oh neither or a bit I guess what we have done is fed into both of those technical documentation technical like we use
zendesk is another tool right so we use zendesk is another part of our tool stack to support our customers and so a brand new feature comes out an actual thing to do let's write up this thing in zendesk but it's also about how we weave education into the product and we use
I know again money sorry I'm not sorry it's actually a really good tool so we do we do use had no guides and we just release let's just say we just really surround Pete's theme so a pain in my team's butt has been manual labor around NPS themes and qualitative data and so
we designed this experience for customers who are in this beta so that they can in the product understand what it is and then if they really need more they can go out to the technical documentation but it's about the education for the customer when I mentioned earlier treating content is a
part of the development life cycle process you really want to treat it as a part of definition of done right and so that team's responsible for all of when you think about chronic lead growth and the emergence of that in particular over the last couple of years it's all about
creating that experience and it keeps people in but helps them upgrade right and so they work alongside product marketing to develop these playbooks for what they're doing in app to create less friction and drive more engagement got it okay that makes a lot more sense would it be safe to say that product
offices essentially for B2B companies where there's all these internal stakeholders sales customer support marketing things like that and there that's the kind of work that you could take off the product manager's plate my personal experience and I think a lot of people would agree with me has led me
to believe that's not accurate it's emerged a lot more in B2B or I think I think we've seen it a lot more in B2B or at least people talking about it and and I'm curious as to why and I wonder if it's because we're sharing because we're all trying to go through this thing
together serving each other and then the other is serving the customer so it's not like here you help me figure this thing out I actually like I was so lucky I still am so lucky to work with so many people in my network in our customer base to help them understand the role or
determine whether they even needed this thing or not without calling out names there are some really big companies in retail and finance and some industries that you would not expect poor b2c larger well-established companies who we all know and love and Maybe not maybe
not even love maybe the experience is bad for us right so they they also do have a lot more cross-functional engagement internally than we can we would even think of so I don't know if it's because you know we're used to this world and we haven't thought about that
side of it but it's really interesting they had it's I think the Common Thread is the cross-functional transparency and then transparency out to the customer and so I mentioned transparency is a big word for us but Readiness is another one right and so Readiness means a lot you
have to your teams you need to get ready internally but you really need to get customers ready for something new as well and everybody needs to feel aligned so it plays a massive part in What the product manager and the product team needs to consider advocate for deliver
and communicate about I feel like no matter the size or industry I imagine a lot of PMS listening to this have this kind of like two-minded view right now of like on the one hand somebody could take all his work off my plate that's awesome on the other it's like oh okay there's another stakeholder after Loop
into every meeting and they're going to be doing this work that's kind of cool and important that I'm not going to get to do anymore and that's weird whatever you found is the best way to convince a PM to this is like wow this would make your life so much better and this is
really yeah I go back to that that question that I have asked leaders when helping them stand this up which is what are you looking at your PMS to drive and how are you measuring their success and that generally just helps everybody get in get on the same page really quickly I've
had customers where I've had folks come to me in in the product community that say I've tried this and it's just not going anywhere you know there's resistance to the role because they feel like it's stepping on too many toes and whatnot and generally generally I will
tell you it's because they still have a bit of buying in the top to get done and I'm seeing that the most successful ones that are drawing the lines and showing that this role is valuable are the people that have their buying from their CEO CPO at that level or their head of product and saying hey this is
what this role means for you so I don't want to say it's it needs to be directive I do want to say that you need to be able to articulate the value to a somebody who's heading up essentially businesses right and saying here's what this role is going to drive for you at
the end of the day the you know very mature product apps orgs end up having people that are strategic advisors to a product leader and so once you can show that this is what you'll also get as a result of me and this other person or me and this team doing this it ends up
being an easier conversation glitter look like a couple bullet points that are most effective to convince a product leader product Ops is going to make a big impact and benefit you and then just like an icpm who's like I don't want this person on my team like what
actually works there to get buy-in yeah number one do you want your PMS to constantly be Fielding questions from your Revenue team when they could be spending time with customers yeah he's shaking your head that one seems to be the one yeah I have to count on one hand the companies who have blocked their
product Managers from speaking to customers and those companies are not product companies I mean they do not believe in product management they might say they do but they don't so that's number one number two is how are you measuring your outcomes and where are
you making this all transparent right is this happening consistently across the board right so one probably see in product teams across I mean so many different places is you might have somebody who's really passionate and really good at doing this stuff for their own vertical
and then it doesn't scale so how are you doing this at scale so that your stakeholders are building this trust in you and making sure that they get the best out of the product team at any in return I say those are the two bullet points that seem to stick the most is that quality time giving the PM what
they need which is their time to be able to drive the outcomes for the customer what is it that you think of PM will never offload if that makes sense like in your perspective what's like the core of a PM's role versus maybe product Ops for now and then maybe potentially other
roles that take off some of the stuff on their plate speaking as a former PM I would not ever give up spending time with customers and watching their pain that sounds really bad customers I'm sorry but you know it that's how I fell in love with product was I saw my custom
my internal customer 12 years back now fighting with the keyboard fighting with the mouse and I was just like oh my gosh what's this guy doing and I think it was it was an experience that some people might say oh I never want to be in that situation again because it made
me feel very uncomfortable that my product is not doing for this person what it needs to but for me it was how do I make this thing do what it needs to for this gentleman how do I make this thing better a night and I cannot see product managers saying I don't want to
be a part of that conversation and you know what I'm gonna Contour I'm gonna say it then don't be in product love it yeah I'm so curious what parts of the role get sliced off over time because I love that that's the core of it is just like build great products that your customers want and use and
want to pay for and then what else can people help you with along the side because yeah if you haven't rolled it's just crazy so many things going on it's crazy oh this article that I wrote I dug into the history of product management and it's like 100 years old in its form
right now oh not as true in his current form but it's about 100 years old and just the evolution of what product managers have historically been responsible for and then if you think about just really sit down and think about what the world has turned into today and how much noise
we have coming at us right we talked about put yourself on do not disturb mode just and I learned a long time ago put myself into a disturbed mode and so imagine having a partner that helps you filter that noise yeah quite useful yeah along those lines I was going to go in a
different direction but as you mentioned that there's all these roles adjacent to PM there's program managers project managers agile product owners and all and then now product Ops I guess before team has product Ops let me just ask this one straightforward question which of those roles generally
does the thing that product Ops can do for you is it the PM or is it one of these other rules it's it's a PM it's PM okay yeah it's a PM and then I would say because what I'm seeing in less mature product orgs who first bringing product UPS the first thing
they ask them to do is streamline the planning process so I would say it's a PM and maybe the agile or yeah right right that's probably what it is today I feel like program management and agile are starting to get a little bit close to each other than what they do and so it it's most of the
PM stuff because you know we're doing elements of their job that they have off to the side versus being able to focus on but again in lesser mature orgs the first thing is how do I actually just get the people to plan the same way and give me the thing that they're planning
on doing that's interesting what you said there that maybe often a wedge to a product Ops person joining their company maybe as a first product Ops person is the planet helping with the planning process is that is that kind of what you find it could be the only thing that
distinguishes product operations folks from program managers and agile is that product operations people know understand the product the customer and the inner workings of the business cool yeah Marty Kagan has some hot takes there about how product owners are never gonna never gonna be great product
managers they don't really understand the customer needs and Building Product in any way that's a whole other topic I want to talk about the career path but before we get there I want to go in a spicy Direction so Casey winners he's the guest on his podcast at one point
and he wrote this hot take many years ago about this kind of premise that operations in general often is kind of a like a Band-Aid for inefficiency at a company and companies often hire a bunch of office people to just solve a problem and often there are much better ways to
solve that problem for example tooling or a new process and his take is often a person doing the thing as often should be the last resort or it's like a temporary Gap and then over time you should strive to find a more efficient way to solve that problem than people
and I don't think he's saying like Ops people in general are not necessary it's just it's an easy default so I'm curious what you think of that take and generally do you think product product Ops is this long term we're going to need more and more of this or is it or is there I don't know different path to
solving the problem the products solves yeah spicy take warning yes I remember this I'll address that inefficiency comment first right I mentioned a little bit earlier as as roles in any industry or in I guess any role matures like marketing or sales this Ops thing ends
up being this natural progression and it's not just because the role itself is maturing it's also because the or is maturity so what I found is and what I'm finding with customers is that Ops alignment across companies is what often ends up keeping the companies moving and
keeping everybody aligned and so to say Ops teams are generally a sign of inefficiency or the need for them as a sign of inefficiency is not always accurate it's generally a sign of growth and opportunity and and people are really just trying to stay in line and do the best for the people that are
doing the thing the product managing the marketing the selling within that org overall though I will say I will agree with his points about getting in and you know maybe giving it off and using humans for other things I wrote something recently and I highlighted something that he mentions
here in this article and what he mentioned on on your podcast which is wiz product apps want to and should be standing up whatever processes or systems are needed and then get out of the way so we can focus on driving more strategic value I keep mentioning that
more mature product Ops folks end up being a very good strategic advisor to leaders in product into the product teams and that continues to be my belief from day one this has been my own personal goal for myself and for my team I myself recently switched roles here at
pendo because I did what I said I was going to do which was stand up the system stand up the things that we knew we needed to do that we're going to either be given off to another team or automated and then get the rest of the humans that are here to do the other strategic things for the product team
some of those are how do we increase retention like I mentioned how do we focus on growth in this one area how do we make the experience better in app how do we do more better voice of customer management my energy now and pendo is I'm able to now go towards more impactful things for not just the
product team and the product Community but for our customers at large so I'm basically saying look I did what I needed to do and I'm ready to go so I think that's something though that people need to be very very comfortable with like very comfortable with and and if
you change course and change your tune two three years into doing this and you built this team you're like here's what you're doing manage this process people are going to lose their minds like change is constant but like telling someone I don't know I no longer need
you to do that it makes them a little bit nervous right so for years when I was interviewing folks for my team I made that one point abundantly cleared them get into this role if you're comfortable letting go of things and moving on to something that is well worth your time
the company is going to change a process is going to need to be tweaked the company is going to change something's going to need to be automated we're going to need to cut something else maybe chat TPT is going to make things very clear that humans are not always going to be doing the same things and we
need to focus our energy elsewhere but people do need to get comfortable with that box role I love that take generally I think it aligns with what Casey's saying like what you're saying what I'm hearing is you may be a product person today doing a bunch of stuff your job in a sense
should be to automate as much of that as you can and find more strategic higher level things you could be doing instead of sitting there connecting Salesforce to to zendesk and you know maintaining that or um degrading customer feedback and theory that could be a tool that
could do that for you and that's kind of part of the job that is that roughly what you're saying that's exactly what I'm saying this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate growth if your business stores any data in the cloud
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building on the stuff we've been just talking about what would you say are just signs that your company would benefit from a product Ops Team and that you're kind of a fit for building a product Ops Team I touched on this quite a bit but that lack of transparency in
many directions up the cross down sometimes like people aren't very transparent about hey this came out budding and here's what we need to do so it's relevant for you know stakeholder management getting stuff out to customers internal teams and making sure they're aligned Revenue teams in
particular that was the first thing we focused on appendo was really aligning our success org and our sales org to the product team and we monitored success just within I think it was a quarter was the time-bound space that we had it in on quality of inbound to the product
team so that was really cool it was just more like thematic questions around tell us what you guys do because our customers would benefit from this versus teach me how to do this thing I wanted to dig into the transparency piece is that is that the same point as the transparency CPS are those two different
kind of heuristics that's transparency yeah so so what happened was we realized that we share this story actually quite openly and I'll share it here again which is one of the things that kicked off products for us was we had a really bad launch a really really bad launch
and it was a moment in company history where we realized that there was not transparency across the aisle and there was this lack of Readiness across the organization and out to customers for what was coming it wasn't this piece that folks say oh well they didn't know
this was coming well there's there's two things they there's the knowing something's coming and then there's the knowing what to do with and you can use just some sort of status keeping thing to say this is coming in Q4 and as we get closer here's the date but it's what to do with it and how to
position it and how to talk about it and all the things that was missing and it was really badly it was really bad and it was it was my fifth week here and it was a moment of well I promised myself I'm gonna let this happen that was one of the the things where I
said I'm going to start to focus a little bit more on product Ops within this director position I had just as director of product and then I spun off I think we need to do this thing and make it a bit more formal just to get on the story a little bit so I didn't know
this so you were a product manager at pendo there's this huge does that this let's not say disaster a bad bad launch and you kind of recognize there's this Gap that maybe I could feel that somebody needs to fill and that you want to take that on can you talk a bit more about that that's really interesting
yeah they brought me in as their first director level and so I was doing a bit of director plus a little bit of icy stuff because we were starting to build up our product team and yes that Lodge happened and the product area was under development for about eight months from what I can
remember and I came in with the Assumption and also knowing fully well that I am a brand new layer in this product team and product people want ownership they crave autonomy they crave trust and all that good stuff I I know that per you know firsthand I did not
want to jump in and say have you done X Y and Z especially in the first four weeks of me being there and yeah it did not go very well and so we recognized that we had more opportunity that we should have grabbed down to to test more with customers to find feedback loops
that were going to be healthy for the team and for our customers to stand up ways for us to measure changes and impactive changes that this thing was making to our customers this was the biggest launch in our company history since the launch of the product and so it was a moment where we all sat
down very openly and shared with each other what we all could have done better and it wasn't just the product team so you know I truly believe with a really healthy product operations person or team you have that ability to impact change across the company and so yes we
look at that story and one day I remember us sitting there one day we're going to look back at the story and we're gonna say oh I remember that and we do now four years later or four and a half years later but yes I felt really passionate about making sure that that didn't happen the gaps you found are
there's just like this lack of internal alignment sales didn't know what was going on customer support didn't know what's going on like that I feel like that's where the Gap was because that's kind of what led to this product Ops it's opportunity rate yes there was
there was a lack of alignment across again like they knew it was coming they just didn't know the extent of what to expect and how to prepare customers or prospects for the change the way that we should have there was definitely training there was there was stuff you know being done it just it
just could have been a whole lot better so there were gaps there one more point was the piece after that was you know I I love people I love managing people I love healthy team environment and Dynamics and that as a product person it means a lot to have that because if you have
direct reports you obviously want them to be happy and healthy but as a product person you have this system around you even if you're not having people that report into you where you feel ownership to make sure these people are healthy and I remember even in my early days of
being a PM I wanted my Engineers to be super happy I wanted them to be proud of work that they were doing and I wanted them to be comfortable letting go of things that we no longer needed and I remember that moment being like looking around and looking at our engineers and
seeing that they were like hold on what like you know where do we go now like what do we do right now and you know we wanted to take that moment and make it less about firefighting and more about being responsible and really customer obsessed and so you know that was our moment our moment or one of our moments
for thinking about okay we might need product operations formalized here it's interesting that your mind went to product Ops because I think most companies would be like oh the the product manager of this product screwed up they didn't communicate enough to ensure just sales they didn't set up the
marketing material well you know it's like often falls on the product team and the product manager what made you realize oh this is a product Ops role and I need to move into that role versus here we are yeah I didn't say in that moment we needed product Ops rule out
all I said in that moment was we need to create a system so that this doesn't happen again and that goes back to my definition of what product Ops is it's it's a thing and it is also a person or a group of people so or it's what it could be one or the other right so I
want to make sure we we decouple that it does not have to be humans it can be that there's a system being created that is from a strong product person who knows how to get this team to be healthy that's a really good way of thinking about it and that clarifies it in a big
way thank you you were talking about transparency and just like a sign that maybe you need product Ops and I think the thing that stuck with me there is just the quality of questions the product team gets from say sales right is that kind of where you narrow yeah I get a lot of questions around
you know I'm investing in this like how do I measure the effectiveness of the team like all of these things and it is really not easy to measure this in a quantitative measure just yet maybe one day right actually yes now one day I feel like it might be coming sooner than
we think so what we did was we looked at that transparency problem we sent out this survey across both product managers and the sales and success teams and we said you know where's your time going PMS right and how much time are you giving on average to the revenue team to
firefight how much time do you have with customers it's quality time and then on the flip side to the revenue team how many times you find yourself asking questions you know like and we gave all of these like you know one to five and blah blah those sorts of things so that
we can figure out where to place our energy and we came up with this okay well it seems like there's a lack of transparency across the two groups let's start with getting data out or information out to the revenue team from the product org we created this product digest silica today and it's matured
quite a bit but it it I go back to this whole people can know when they're coming but they need to know what it is they need to do with it so this thing was less about this this thing's coming next quarter go tell your customers it's more about here's how you get ready for
it here's how you get jazzed about and then the handoff which is probably the question you're going to have at some point which is with your line between pmm and products the handoff is that we don't teach them to sell we don't teach them to position but we know that the
product intimately enough to help them understand the new value to help them understand how to use the thing and to make sure that they're hitting the ground let's ask that question if there's anything anymore and yeah what is that line between product Ops and product
marketing yeah I always say this and it's worked I haven't seen anybody dispute it um yet but product marketing positions and helps the revenue team sell their lead gen you know for all of the outbound and the campaigns that they're running and they are marketing right they're helping you at the end of
the day make this thing sound amazing and do the right things with it and for us it's about educating and it's about helping our internal folks our Internal Revenue team understand what is the added value how do you now do this thing how does this impact Your Role right we
we focus a bit on the customer success persona for example on pendo customer success managers can go in they can see their account health and what's going on in blah blah how does this impact you as a customer success rep and how do you then help your customers understand the
value from not hey can you help us upsell this thing and here's how you do it great answer makes a lot of sense to me final topic the career path of a product Ops person yes a lot of people listening to this podcast are either PMS today or one of bpms or thinking about becoming
product and I'll say product manager because PM can mean a lot of things and it's interesting there's this new path that people can explore product Ops I'm curious who you think might be a fit for the product Ops role versus the product mandrel like someone deciding oh man
maybe I should go down this other route what do you think are just signs that maybe you'd be a better fit where you enjoy that rap better I love that question because it makes me feel that this role has become embraced a bit more when I hear questions like in the past it was do we need this role and how do
we help get the buy-in and now it's more the acceptance of a product manager to maybe one even become this and I'm seeing more PMS like I said go into the space so it's no longer being seen so much as a threat it's being seen as this partner and I love so just one I'll say
that um I think if you're someone like me who absolutely loves and I mentioned the story about the engineers and the team health and stuff if you love creating that healthy team environment and one where there's cross-functional collaboration and it fuels you to empower the team more it's a wonderful
fit for you again I I was a PM for years and I felt that pain so much and how much we had to do in order to make this world change and then figure out whether it's valuable and I knew that there had to be a better way to get better outcomes to happen but I also know that
better outcomes don't just mean for the product it means better outcomes for the entire product team for the customer experience at large and ultimately for the business and so I think that that's one thing if you're curious and you really want to learn more about that
side of the house one of the beautiful things I saw was one of my products managers fall more in love with understanding the business as she was starting to mature in her products career and I thought that was really cool she had already had product background and she was like I want to
understand the inner workings here so that I know how to help these people so the other thing is like I think if if you're a PM having issues with the role that you're currently in I think all need to remember that you are there to solve problems and that's a very simple
thing that we talked about what are the things that PMS won't shed and shouldn't shed and not go and talk to customers we have to talk to customers in order to to solve the problems figure out the right problems to solve you do that in product Ops as well you don't have to go out to
customers externally but my customers and the people I speak to are internally and they are helping me understand the pain that the product team is tied to so you know if you don't love solving problems through building brand new features and building a product then how
can you help contribute to solving other ones of future Problem Solver think about whether you want to do that so if you know the pain what can you do to build a better experience overall can ultimately impact your business do you find most product Ops people at
least at this point are former product managers like what would be the pie chart of last job was product manager versus not of existing product office people I got to put on a new survey I do I really have to sign a new survey initially I saw a lot more folks moving in from management consulting from
customer success from technical success I haven't seen anyone from sales move in yet and I have seen a couple PMS now that's the day-to-day products manager I will tell you that the people who are standing up the product Ops orgs and being the first products higher the kind
of like leadership level are former product people and I strongly advocate for product Ops leaders to have done that role to have actually had Hands-On product experience building and understanding customer problems and feeling that pain because you are you very quickly realizing where
to place your efforts and where your team's effort should go and that helps you from an efficiency perspective and the business knows you're not just Dilly dallying that's really interesting that makes a lot of sense yeah the just the roles you named again were products people come
from you said customer success what are the others again I've seen technical success I've seen management consulting yeah that with that the management consulting piece makes a bit makes a ton of sense to me I think there's that data piece that they really like to lean into
an advisory but yeah and then the leadership ones coming in from from product leader roles and that's been a happy change too right seeing a director say I know want to move into a position to coach the teams and to help build a stronger product team overall and I
don't feel like Building Products fascinating for someone that's like wow I want to do this job this sounds rad what advice would you give for people to pursue this role and get a gig in product Ops well one it's a good thing that there's no shortage of these rules oh yeah I
would say that there there are a lot of these roles open out in the industry be intentional about what you want to do because right now it's still in a bit of well what what are we doing in product operations as an as a product management community and there's no consistency
industry to Industry size to size team to team it is very different so really think about your strengths do you do you love data are you a person who thrives on being able to make Beauty out of this mess that you're seeing right and advise people and help them understand maybe
this is a direction that we should be going in are you technical where you're like no I actually really enjoy doing the quantitative side of things and you love you truly enjoy working data science teams and you really like to bring that data aspect to the product team you could probably find a mix of
both right there are people who too like doing both of those things do you thrive on just generally I mentioned this and I keep saying it like standing up that system because you know that if you had it you would have been a better pm like I think that that's a big thing
there if if people realize that there's a better way to do it and they no longer have to do it all but they can do a slice of it in order to drive efficiency for the organization then start you know thinking about going out there and doing it so and the other
thing too is look at those roles and make sure that you find tooth comb those job descriptions some of them are are very vague because they they're trying to figure it out on their own as well so the more you know what you want to do as a product person the more you know what to weed out from
these roles are there red flags when you're looking at a product job description of like this isn't really the kind of role you you want I think this is a red flag for any role I mentioned that it's really hard right now to put a number to the success of the role or on the success of the role
but if there's no this is how you will be measured or this is what we're looking at as a successful outcome for this person in this role I would say that's probably a red one that's table Stakes people need to have found their job descriptions final question yes something I try to
get to with people from new companies that I haven't talked to before is just to get a general sense of how the product org is structured at the company just because people are always curious just like how do you structure product teams and and so I guess broadly I left
you here just just like hours of the pendo T product team structured like what are the buckets and then also is their product Ops person integrated into each cross-functional product team yeah I too love to learn about this we're broken into uh major areas of the business or
revenue streams and we have general managers over those and the jams actually sit in the product team which is nice I'll have PM background all really really experienced and incredible we also have a head of growth so there's that component to it as well then you
generally got the senior directors their teams of product managers who are responsible for different areas in the products that we've got one product that's our core product and very mature broken down into different components there we have you know a newer product where that's just one straight product
team versus like having many different directors we do have a product UPS person integrated into these teams I'd say probably all of them at this point but the key thing here is they share themselves across two or three teams something going through listeners Minds
right now is Christine is there a ratio of product homes people to team I would say that at one point I I felt like there might have been and I don't think that I don't think that's the case anymore and it's again based on my experience and what I'm learning we operate pretty lean and a lot of people
are having to operate it's very lean right now so every few quarters we look at our goals we determine who or what goals need a product Ops person and for what reason we're really intentional about it as an example I use this saying restruct the hustle with my team a little bit for the newer product that's
still kind of finding its way and the last thing you want to do as a product which for somebody who I had a legacy product in my last job ain't one that I was building from the ground up and one that I was just responsible for getting out the door sun setting at some point
you don't want anyone stifling creativity with any sort of process or some time bound this or anything like that so the last thing you want to do is introduce something in there that feels like that you want them to hit the ground running and so we don't over index on things like a certain planning
process or you know you need to get this to us because the other teams have it's like we need to know this thing by this time frame we'll do what we need to do from there that's it and we're also quicker with the data right like um voice of customer stuff takes a
little bit longer for a more mature product team and and or this is more like what are we learning right now and how quickly can we communicate this over to that team so they can iterate really quickly awesome and to come back to the structure just briefly so you have GM's
business units within the business units you have directors or product that report up to the GM within each and the directors or product have cross-functional product team that they operate that build specific features and elements of the larger product and then
there's a product Ops person supporting some of these teams and they share it across teams yep and they've got everybody rolls up to a CPO cpo's got yes got all of this Christine with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got six questions
for you I'm gonna just fire them away does that sound good yes let's do it let's do it two or three books that you recommend most to other people classic is inspired by Marty Kagan it's one of the reasons I really fall in love with product it's inspirational um Leaders Eat Last uh Simon sinek I
really like that book too that's more leadership style and making sure you're putting your team first which is something I strongly believe in this Applause but I also really like the book and it's very practical so it falls in that category which is the product LED organization by our CEO Todd Olson
really good book for right now especially with people really going through this transformation and there's an old box that I have that's sitting on that shelf it's product roadmaps relaunched it is really old like I mean I don't want to date myself but it's almost 20 years old when
I was in college but it's really really valuable and I can I can reference it just for a quick oh yeah I forgot about that from a communication perspective for a roadmap like this is really cool so favorite other podcast the product Experience podcast from mind the product
I really like that one a little bit similar to this other favorite one I'm on right now but lots of really good product people and just very practical advice too I really like the uh for leadership I like hbr ideacast it's just again I like to balance the business side and the people side with typical on
leaderships favorite recent movie or TV show because I have kids my brain is flooded generally with kid shows I would say this year it was between the new Matilda movie which is based on the Broadway production which was based on the old Matilda movie but it's really
really garage really well done and then there's this movie I think it's called rise have you seen it it's about the Giannis I cannot say forgive me his last name but he's on the Milwaukee Bucks basketball player it's about overcoming adversity and just struggle and really
pushing through and giving it your all and I think that one is is a really good attitude list if you haven't it's called rise TV I have um food I I don't have a favorite TV show I've just finished watching White Lotus if that was qualified but that's qualifies it's uh get my brain out of
yeah the most popular mentioned TV show on this podcast yeah I would say for TV in general you give me anything food I love cooking I'll cook an entire massive meal three course whatever sit down and eat it while I'm watching work so yeah yum favorite interview question that you
like to ask when you're interviewing people if you could choose any career outside of what you're doing what would it be and why what do you look for in an answer there that tells you that this is a strong candidate versus not there are skills that are a part of that other role that I would
lean into so like if somebody were to ask me that question I would tell you a chef and it's about experience and it's about constantly refining your craft and it's about constantly looking to delight and I think that speaks to my love for product it's all about that and state
for the customer so I always ask that question and I look to see you know what is it are they looking for fame are they looking for you know just a temporary role it tell it's really telling like you dig into the qualities of what makes a good candidate for the
other thing and you can figure out a lot fascinating and if they're watching this and learning this secret that's a good sign too they're doing the research yeah top five SAS products that you love user work other than pendo we already know we already know that's on the list uh yeah I love Nero I love
Miro so much during the pandemic this became an essential tool for so many teams like I I brought it into our company I and I was a big Advocate Part of my last one as well just the collaboration and connection figma along the same lines I think like figma's really great at that for a design team
and and the rest of product so that one's been really good seismic is one that I really like as well that's the content management system for our go to market teams so it really plays well into like the how do we make sure we we give them what they need in the tool
that they need to be in gong is another one I think gong's really great like I've watched them go from their early days and we were I think we were an early customer or we were using early on and just the way that they help they'd I think they pivoted at some point or they've
definitely up there messaging on the coaching for their teams and us being able to dig into the qualitative insights that we get on those calls as product people is really good too so yeah great list uh ones that people haven't mentioned before so that's
always fun final question but something relatively minor that you've changed in pendo's product development process that has had a tremendous impact on the way that you build product this one's gonna sound really Elementary so for some people really on Montreal but for some
people they're going to be like uh-huh I totally feel that early on we started bringing in Engineers to customer meetings more and more and you know you don't want to type gas or profile an engineer but generally they're not raising their hand really and being like yeah I'm going to come
and join blah blah like they want to make sure they're doing their job and building the building the experience but it's so simple and it's so effective and when we started doing it the response from the engineering team was great and then also it helped us dig into a
different side of the customer while we were on call Sometimes some of them were flies on the walls some of them were like actually engaging with the engineers and helped them increase their confidence in speaking to customers so I don't know I feel like that just ended up changing a lot of the way that we
started planning and and making sure that they were their voice had a certain amount of weight or even more weight than it did before in the product development life cycle we respect their time remember some were very nervous and be like I gotta do all this other stuff
but you know they're like okay I'll try it and then all of a sudden they're like well I really want to do this more and more but it's just really being able to see that pain for them firsthand from a customer or the Delight in frustration was very impactful so that's my answer
and I feel like if you're not doing that as a product manager or product leader then you better get on that train real fast because it really it's life-changing for for the entire team that is an awesome answer this is the first time I've asked this question I think I'm going to make
it a standard question now because I feel like we're going to get all kinds of cool nuggets so thank you for starting it off with a bang Christine thank you so much for joining me I learned more about product Ops in an hour than I've learned in years and years of reading about it online and so
thanks for making the time thanks for sharing all your wisdom two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out learn more maybe ask you some questions about product Ops and then how can listeners be useful to you they can connect with
me on LinkedIn you'll put that up on shore Twitter same and I've got my own site to theproductheart.com started posting on product management products I'm going to start doing some stuff on careers all that good stuff how can they be useful so don't laugh at me people like I uh needed a Twitter
reset and so I had that for 13 years and then I no longer did and now I do it so just help me rebuild over there and just kind of get get back on that site so um long term that's more immediate but I would say help me understand what's going on in product and product apps
um I will continue to do things like this and share more about what I'm learning but I need to learn more from other people as well and that's an amazing incredible part of my job that I'm about to do and there's there's just like a lot of pain right now all around us in
the tech industry I think about today and probably the next year or so and and for people who are really questioning their next steps in their product careers whether they stay in it whether they you know move into something adjacent or relevant they're looking to sharpen their skills maybe make a site
pivot to Ops whatever it is right I'm really interested to just gather more data on this and see how it all plays out while also trying to see if I can make some connections so I've been able to do that let's go first full circle back to Dan like Ben did this for me and
you right I think that it's really important that the product Community is smaller than we think it's large and it feels expansive but it's smaller than we think and I think we're all facing an interesting time where people may be again questioning that next move or struggling it would just be amazing for
us to share so cheesy sound product apps for me was an easy way to be able to connect the doc and be that partner right and talk about the transparency and alignment and I just if there's a way that this community can help Empower me to do more of that for all of you I
think that that would be incredibly helpful what a beautiful way to end it Christine thank you again for being here thank you oh this is so fun so much fun bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or
your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode [Music]