What is the Product Operations Career Path?

The product operations role is an increasingly important part of the product ecosystem. Those who choose a career in product operations support the product management team. Product management teams grapple with increasing demands on their time and attention.Some organizations already consider product operations a separate and distinct area from product management. In contrast, others organically create product operations-related roles. In the latter case, they may only realize in retrospect these new roles fall within the larger umbrella of the product operations trend.As product operations staffing matures, so has the range of titles, responsibilities, and career pathways in this discipline.This article explores the skills and characteristics of excellent product operations personnel, some of specific product operations roles, and where savvy product operations professionals might find themselves in the future.

Significant Variation Exists within Product Operations Roles

Prospective product operations professionals should familiarize themselves with the product operations manager's role. Given the nascent nature of product operations and the organic way the function often develops at some organizations, there isn't yet an established, consistent hierarchy or functional view of product operations found from company to company.Generally, organizations develop product operations roles as needed to offload non-core tasks from product managers, increasing the efficiency, effectiveness, and value-add of product management. As a result, product operations' evolution has more to do with the organization's specific needs, size, budget, and industry rather than filling in names in a pre-defined team org chart.A product operations manager at a smaller technology company with one main product may engage in different activities than someone with the same title at a large firm. However, the consistent thread running through both roles focuses on enabling the product team's work.Size matters quite a bit in this case. Larger organizations working across multiple products or product lines may find they need a lean and intrepid product operations team to maintain sufficient consistency across products. Meanwhile, smaller companies may need less focus on clarity and sustainable consistency and more tactical support around managing data, tools, and communications. The problems product operations must solve further shape product operations' specific evolution.

Targeted interview questions

With all this diversity and variation in young and dynamic space, how can future product operations professionals find jobs that best fit their skills and interests best? Beyond the usual screening questions about strategy, culture, processes, and values, product operations professionals may also want to ask some of the more pertinent questions about their role:

• How does the product team define successful product operations?
• How does the organization see product operations evolving in the next 2-3 years?
• Does this role focus on one product, or does it span multiple products?
• Does this role support communication and information flow with other parts of the organization, such as marketing, sales, finance, and support?
• How developed are the organization's processes, and is the role of product operations more to build and document processes—guided by the needs and requirements of product—or more to refine, document, and shepherd the ongoing use of established methods?
• How does the product operations domain intersect with data?

What Skills or Characteristics Make a Great Product Operations Professional?

Natural-born product operations staff are systems thinkers continuously interested in the most efficient way to get things done. Great at juggling multiple priorities guided by the lens of what product needs to be successful, a strong product operations worker must know the product well, which demands deep curiosity and insight.

Good perspective

Good perspective-taking skills are also necessary. Product operations must listen closely to stakeholders beyond just the product team, putting themselves in their various shoes and understanding their individual needs and concerns.What do the sales or marketing teams need to know about a product? How can product operations help tailor information, metrics, and data for each audience to ensure the correct information gets to the right people on time?

Analytical

A facility with data is a great way to gain a foothold in the product operations space. Product managers face a firehose of customer data, and—with increasing calls for customer obsession and direct contact with customers—product managers sit at the intersection of both incoming and outgoing data. However, managing and automating this data is outside the scope of core product management duties, providing an opportunity to offload some of this wrangling to a product operations professional.

Organization

Another critical product operations skill is organizing, automating, and making meaning out of this data tsunami. The ability lets product managers spend less time digging up or transmitting the basics. Instead, they can focus more time extracting the deep value that eventually informs the product roadmap. Pair this ease and expertise with data along with some deep product knowledge, and you'll soon be an invaluable asset to product management.Finally, top-notch communication skills are critical. In many ways, product operations represent aspects of the product team to the broader organization. They can increase the cadence of reporting and informational updates.

What is the Product Operations Career Path?

With this appreciation for the developing nature of product operations and some essential questions to help better understand the opportunity during the interview process, what are the vital roles typically found in product operations?

Some product operations roles

• Product data analyst
• Operations specialist
• Operations manager
• Product operations director

The brief list above is by no means exhaustive but represents the general gist of the roles companies are currently hiring for. Smart searchers will note terms such as specialist can also substitute for a coordinator, lead, team lead, etc.Sometimes the job is very focused; for example, serving as the business owner of an agile software tool such as JIRA, used by product management and other product development stakeholders. Different roles exclusively focus on customer data, for example, product dashboards and KPI tracking.Larger organizations with established product operations teams may have a hierarchy with job titles prefaced by an associate, senior, etc. But for now, top-level management product operations roles on par with a VP of Product or Chief Product Officer don't exist.This makes sense, as the number one focus of product operations is enabling the product team's success. Since product operations, support product management, the product operations function ultimately reports to the head of product at some point in the organizational structure.The following few sections look at the specifics of different product operations roles, including responsibilities, skills, and advancement opportunities.

Product operations specialist

This entry-level job is the perfect way to get your foot in the door in product operations and touches on all the core areas of product operations. Successful candidates will demonstrate their ability to create and maintain systems to make the product team successful.Data is essential, so each candidate should think about when to assemble and analyze data used for decision-making. Documentation, report building, and communication are also critical parts in this role, highlighting the "connective tissue" role product operations plays for product management.

Job duties

Below is an excerpt of responsibilities for a product operations specialist position (found on LinkedIn) at Muck Rack:

• Building and iterating on systems that inform the tech team of key user issues and seeing through their resolutions.
• Creating accountability systems that better track and circulate the status of feature development to inform internal teams.
• Documenting existing processes and systems within the product team for broader circulation.
• Summarizing trends and themes from feature requests, support tickets, and churn reasons.
• Compiling reports on recent feature requests and upcoming launches to share with internal stakeholders.
• Managing feature development and maintenance projects that sit within the product, engineering, and design teams.
• Improving the visibility of Muck Rack's product roadmap to both internal and external stakeholders.
• Gathering and analyzing product data, surfacing to relevant teams to inform the direction and understanding of key features.

An entry-level product operations specialist role is an ideal vantage point to get a sense of the company, its products, and its processes. Specialists get exposure to various other stakeholder teams in the company, and the varied responsibilities create a foundation for an ambitious product operation professional to build upon.Specialists can move deeper into product management, drift away from the product to operational roles other intersecting teams, or drill down to focus on just one component of the specialist role, such as communications or data or support of systems used by the product teams.

Product data analyst

Unlike the product operations specialist job, which tends to be more of a generalist role, the product data analyst role is more narrowly focused on data and its associated processes. This entry- to mid-level job focuses on the data generated by and used by the product team across the entire product lifecycle.To be successful, the right candidate has data and analytical skills, familiarity with data tools, and demonstrated ability to develop, own, and manage processes related to data, data quality, and integrity. An interest in learning the ins and outs of both the product and any existing processes the product team uses is critical. Context is vital, and understanding the product management context and details is essential to delivering real value.

Job responsibilities

Here is an excerpt of responsibilities for a product data analyst position (found on LinkedIn) at MX:

• Monitor system performance and calculate success metrics
• Work with Product Management and Engineering to define, scope, and create new features to improve the classification & categorization engine.
• Manage quality improvement processes and ensure issues are identified, tracked, reported on, and resolved timely.
• Research merchants and locations to augment system coverage
• Plan, design, develop and perform quality assessments in Top Offenders, System Transaction Rule Creation/Update, Confidence Test Creation/Update, Validation of Model Predictions to document and evaluate performance and data integrity.
• Configure, operate and develop manual and automated methods, processes, and procedures to test output or input based on data compliance, quality, and use requirements established by product management, client specifications, and governance programs.
• Performs regular and ad hoc reviews, audits, and investigations of data activity and integrity; prepares reports and summaries of findings.
• Produces and updates guidelines and documentation of data quality development processes, procedures, and standards.

When product data analysts are ready to move on to a new role, they have many potential opportunities. A product data analyst could lean into the operations and process portion of their experience, exploring other operational functions, perhaps guided by the departments they most enjoyed working with. Doubling down on data and moving into a different role in the data ecosystem is another possibility. Product data analysts drawn to the product management world could explore a shift from operations to products.

Product operations manager

Like the product data analyst role, the product operations manager role is a similar jack-of-all-trades to support product, but with more ownership and creative control. This role is frequently the first product operations position an organization hires.Candidates for this role may come from other operations areas, product management, data, or project/program management. Understanding the needs of product management is key, as well as a vital process orientation and the ability to look ahead and think critically about where disconnects and breakdowns happen and avoid those outcomes.

Job description

Here is an excerpt from a product operations manager job description (found on LinkedIn) at Clear Capital:

• Take proactive steps to ensure the product management team and our processes and best practices scale with the company
• Craft and maintain practices for communication, cross-department coordination, product knowledge base management, project management, goal setting, metrics reporting, and executive updates
• Monitor and assess internal product analytics to help the team prioritize work and make well-informed decisions.
• Create and maintain centralized repositories of competitive intelligence, customer feedback, and market segment use cases
• Own special projects including creating product documentation, designing sales training tools, and writing product requirement documents.

Much like the product operations specialist, the product operations manager has their pick of future opportunities based on the broad responsibilities of the role. Product operations allow an enterprising professional to learn and demonstrate a deep understanding of the product and the processes used for lifecycle management.Subsequent roles could be deeper in product or focus on a particular part of the lifecycle, such as product launch or technical support operations. The most critical aspect to leveraging a product operations background is telling a story about the impact of operations work on the product team's efficiency and effectiveness, focusing on accomplishments related to the most relevant aspect of the next role.

Product operations director

Given the newness of product operations as a dedicated discipline, the scarcity of director-level positions in product operations makes sense. Some of these more senior product operations focus on a specific product operations area, including shepherding a particular element of product management such as product lifecycle, resource management, or strategic planning process owner.Product operations directors have many of the same high-level responsibilities as product operations managers and manage a team of operations colleagues. Directors conduct the operational orchestra, making sure each section comes in at the right moment and playing the right notes so the orchestra can work together and create beautiful music. While each element of product operations are important—data, communications, and process—the best directors bring a holistic approach to the role.

Job responsibilities

Below is an excerpt of the responsibilities for a product operations director (found on LinkedIn) at OpenSea:

• Collecting, organizing, and analyzing product and customer usage data to help product management and executive leadership make informed decisions
• Streamlining communication between the product teams and other teams in the organization
• Documenting, standardizing, scaling product management-specific processes, such as roadmap planning, feature requirements, and retrospectives, and business processes, such as planning, budgeting, and reporting
• Facilitating product feedback review and planning meetings
• Identifying, prioritizing, and solving operational challenges to improve productivity
• Developing and maintaining a continuing education program for product managers, researching and organising information on product management best practices

Like other roles in product operations, directors' future careers can go in many directions, guided by which product operations areas they find most enjoyable and fulfilling. An operations or enablement role with the need for solid process leadership may be an excellent fit. Staking out a career in product operations leadership the overall discipline develops puts directors on the cutting edge of this increasingly important product function for the industry.

Product Operations can Lead to many Different Paths

The vantage point product operations provide is unique. While a budding product manager can look up from their rung in the organizational chart hierarchy and identify the top job directly in her function, a product operations manager must think more creatively about how to apply best the skills they've honed in product operations forward.Asking themselves, "What parts of this function did I enjoy and why? Which parts were my least favorite and why?" further informs this career-oriented introspection. The answers help point product operations professionals toward their next step, whether climbing the ladder in product operations or a slight pivot into a related function.With the right set of communication, data analysis, and automation skills, along with a passion for systems thinking, repeatable processes, and product management enablement, product operations offers an exciting career full of diverse opportunities as you grow and develop.