Product Ops is one of the newest and most exciting specializations in the world of tech. It sits at the intersection of product management and traditional ops work. As a Product Ops Manager, your role is to make sure the product team is set up for success. That means streamlining communications and feedback loops with engineering, sales, and marketing, providing analysis to help Project Managers make more informed decisions, and making sure that all your internal processes are streamlined and optimized. You might also be responsible for things like onboarding new hires and training your team members on new tools and technologies. POMs are the grease that keeps everything else running smoothly – it's a critical role with a huge opportunity to make an impact.
Once you've got the basics down cold, it's time to get specific. Here are some key resources to help you get up-to-speed on the basic of Product Operations. We've organized them by skill, so you can bone up on the areas where you're less confident. Check them off as your go!
You're an expert when it comes to giving customers the tools they need to succeed. You know how to listen to their needs, clearly walk them through procedures, and proactively reach out in order to head off their potential problems before the need even arises. Your background is in using your strong interpersonal skills to ensure your customers' journeys run smoothly. This requires keeping and constant eye on how they're doing, anticipating future problems they might be heading toward, and heading off those problems before they're reached. The experience juggling a myriad of concerns, potential problems, and proactive solutions gives you core skills you need for any operations-heavy role, and your experience is particularly relevant to product operations specifically because of a product operator's heavy focus on communication between different teams with different goals. You're used to communicating internal constraints with external customers, so you're more than ready to facilitate the communication between cross-functional teams!
You know how to build strong relationships and interface with multiple stakeholders. Versatility is one of your primary strengths: you’re used to approaching unfamiliar problems, breaking them down into component parts, and digging up whatever information you need to solve whatever problem you’re working on. Your background has taught you how to approach and solve a wide variety of problems, which leaves you well-prepared to tackle the myriad of problems that product operators must solve smoothly and proactively in order to keep their ship afloat. You're also an expert making connections and working cross-functionally, which gives you a leg up when when it comes to facilitating communication and data-sharing between departments.
You know how to grow a business through a combination of deeply understanding the relevant market and building relationships. You can generate leads out of a slough of noise and use them to form valuable human connections with potential clients. Your background had equipped you to form high-leverage relationships in order to make sure high-leverage tasks get done. You're uniquely suited both to support the product team in defining their vision for each product's lifecycle and make sure that vision is seamlessly communicated to all the relevant internal teams.
You're a master of cross-functional communication, particularly as it pertains to syncing every team involved in a product's lifecycle. From developing a new product to launching and marketing it, you know everything that goes into both starting and finalizing a product. Your background is in owning the development of products, and, depending on the size and nature of your previous workplaces, you may actually have already done some of the work of a product operator: product operators handle the day-to-day tasks and details associated with product development. Perhaps you've decided that keeping an eye on the details as opposed to focusing on the more abstract big-picture is more your cup of tea or perhaps you're simply looking for a slight change of pace. Either way, your experience with macro-level product concerns give you unique insights into which micro-level tasks are the most crucial to focus on or, perhaps, improve.
Organization and logistics are your primary tools, and you know exactly how to see projects through from beginning to end. You're also a master of contextualizing the goals, budget, and schedule of different projects so that the relevant details stand out in sharp focus without getting bogged down in unnecessary minutiae. Your background is in day-to-day organization and logistics, and this is the bread and butter of product operations. You know how to handle all of the details that go into getting a project of the ground while making sure nothing slips through the cracks, and you're uniquely suited to own, develop, and optimize various teams' strategies for meeting their goals.
Not only are you adept at building relationships, you're also a wizard at maintaining them: you're used to serving as the long-term liaison and trusted confidant of your clients. You know how to delight customers by proactively answering their questions, solving their problems, and otherwise seeing to their needs. Your background is in maintaining good relationships and making sure processes run smoothly. The main difference between doing this in the capacity of an account manager as opposed to in the capacity of a product operator is just a matter of who those relationships are with and what those processes are. The skills required to maintain long-term relationships with clients are largely similar to the skills required to maintain long-term relationships between teams, and an eye for detail and penchant for proactively solving problems are equally critical whether you're streamlining a user's experience or internal processes.