Looking to scale product ops? We sat down with May Wong, Co-author of The Product Operations Manifesto, Organizer of ProductTO, and all-around product operations expert, to share her advice with Product Management leaders looking to build out or scale their product ops team.

Pull back the curtain to help us understand the value a product operations leader brings to the person sitting in the CPO/VP Product seat.

A Product Operations Leader is your partner in building your product management discipline within the context of your product, market, and organization. It’s not about frameworks or roadmaps but about the culture of how you build – transparent, aligned, collaborative, data-informed, outcomes-driven.

They are highly specialized product leaders who build the foundations and systemic structures that evolve strategic alignment and ways of working as your organization grows. Some product leaders might say, “But that’s my job!” It may be their responsibility to see it happen, but given all they have to do, it’s almost impossible to do it well.

A product leader at every level has five main responsibilities:

• People Management
• Product/Portfolio Strategy for your team(s)
• Stakeholder management
• Higher-level Portfolio/Company strategy
• Team alignment (aka, how does my team work together?)

The lowest priority will always be “How does my team work together?” or what I call “Product Operations.” For many product leaders, building a great team was the primary reason for entering leadership. As your organization grows and scales, there’s never enough time, and your top priority is ensuring that your team is working towards the optimal strategy.

Product Operations is the permanent low-priority elephant in the room that gets in the way of everything. In order to get rid of it, you need to deliberately invest in people to do the work of product operations. Every hour your PM spends figuring out how to do things in the company is an hour not spent on research, synthesis, and alignment for better product decisions. Each PM reinvents the wheel because they don’t have the wider mandate. The struggles eventually turn into frustration, misalignment, apathy, and employee churn in product and beyond.

Building product operations isn’t guaranteed to resolve your issues, but a talented product ops person (or team) will start changing the way your whole organization fundamentally works together, and everything will start to feel better. Your PMs and teams deliver more measurable value with more transparency and alignment. Your employee turnover decreases due to improved role clarity. You can see the progress being made towards the vision and strategy. This is everything that’s important, but no one ever had the mandate or the time to do it.

What would you want that leader to have considered before they begin a search for a Product Operations Leader?

The size and complexity of your organization makes a huge difference in determining what you really need. The larger and more complex your organization, the greater the value in having a dedicated person focus on making product management make sense in that context.

Where are your team’s primary struggles?

Agreement on portfolio-wide strategy: This is the core role of the Head of Product. What is taking up the rest of your time, and should that be product operations?

Organization-wide alignment of the strategy: This is generally the role of the managers or product leads. In more complex organizations, you may need product operations to standardize and streamline these activities.

Is there a specific focus of your struggles?: That will help you decide if you should first bring on a product ops person with GTM or engineering alignment expertise vs. a generalist.

Organizational complexity and inter-team blockers: An experienced organizational change leader is ideal here.

Levelling up the team: You need someone who understands the theory and practice of product management. Coaching goes a long way. Setting up OKRs (or tracking equivalents) is hard, especially if you want them to be useful.

Access to better information for better product decision-making: Organizational change expertise is important here. For data access, do you have an existing data team? If not, this person will likely also set up and own this pillar until it spins off. For customer access, do you have a UX research or compatible customer success team? If not, someone with research experience would be super valuable to build a great customer interview program.

Other things to consider:

• Will you get pushback from the other teams if you bring in this interdisciplinary role with an explicit change mandate?
• What would have to be true to effectively implement your strategy?
• Are you ready to let go of your desire to control how your team functions?

How do we better evaluate good vs. great product operations candidates?

Product Operations people are not Program Managers or Project Managers. Think of us more like your Chief of Staff in pursuit of operational excellence focused on product outcomes.

Is the candidate talking about strategy and outcomes? A product operations leader is a highly specialized product leader where the whole product discipline is the product. Success is when product management has everything they need to do their job, and everyone else has what they need from product management to collectively work towards the strategy.

The key to success is making sure that your principles and values of product management are aligned. This person is going to be doing a lot of organization-wide alignment and buy-in work on your behalf. If you don’t believe in Product Owners, and they do, they are going to build the wrong team structure. If you want fully complete PRDs before engaging development and they subscribe to Teresa Torres’s product trio principle, this is not going to work well.

The hardest part of product operations is organization-wide change leadership. This skill is non-negotiable. If you are spinning up a new product operations discipline, previous 0-1 experience goes a long way, focused more around larger pieces of change. If you’re looking at more slow and steady growth, the organization is likely stable enough to track metrics around the impact of product ops. Generally, these product ops people come from larger and more established companies and focus more around continuous improvements.

A great product operations person inspires the whole organization to do better. Look for that spark. What kind of questions are they asking and is it leading you to think about deeper problems? Do you feel the urge to divulge more about your feelings than you normally do? Tackling deep systemic problems requires these abilities. It’s never about specific frameworks, but the discovery and implementation of great ways of working that fit your product, market, and organization.

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We thank May for her invaluable insights into product operations and best practices for hiring and scaling this function.

Are you starting to interview? Here are our top five product operations interview questions.