Why Product Operations? The Big Picture
Imagine your product team is growing fast. Suddenly, what used to be simple—one product, a handful of people—turns into a maze of teams, priorities, and information silos. Decisions slow down, processes fragment, and everyone feels a bit lost. Sound familiar?
That's exactly the pain point Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles address in "Product Operations." The book is a roadmap for anyone who wants to scale product organizations without drowning in chaos. From my own experience managing processes in a large product-driven service, I found many chapters resonated deeply with the real challenges of scaling and aligning teams.
The Three Pillars: What Makes Product Ops Work
The authors break down Product Operations into three core pillars:
1. Business Data & Insights
Product Ops connects financial and operational metrics directly to product strategy. It's not just about collecting data—it's about making it actionable:
- Aggregating data from CRM, finance, product analytics
- Segmenting by customer, product, geography
- Building dashboards for every level, from execs to squads
2. Customer & Market Insights
Here, Product Ops becomes the bridge between teams and the real world:
- Creating user research repositories
- Standardizing feedback loops and recruiting processes
- Analyzing competitors and market trends
3. Process & Practices
This is where Product Ops shines as an enabler, not a controller:
- Defining roles and career paths
- Building templates and frameworks for teams
- Orchestrating strategic cadences and rituals
- Managing and rolling out the right tools
Product Ops is like plumbing: it doesn't tell the water where to go, but it makes sure it flows where it's needed most.
From Theory to Practice: My Experience
In my own journey—building SaaS products, leading cross-functional teams, and scaling up in large product organizations—I've seen firsthand how easy it is for product organizations to lose alignment as they grow. We often solved these challenges intuitively, but this book gave me a structured lens to see the bigger picture.
What resonated most was the focus on people and enablement. Product Ops isn't about bureaucracy; it's about making life easier for teams, so they can focus on delivering value. The best processes are invisible when they work—and painfully obvious when they don't.
How to Start: Practical Advice
The book wisely suggests: don't try to implement everything at once. Start with your biggest pain point:
- Lack of data? Begin with Business & Data Insights.
- Disconnected from customers? Focus on Customer & Market Insights.
- Process chaos? Build your Operating Model first.
Often, Product Ops starts as a "team of one." The key is to avoid becoming the go-to firefighter for every problem—instead, focus on systematizing and enabling others.
Team Models: Embedded, Shared, or Hybrid?
Perri and Tilles outline three ways to structure Product Ops:
- Embedded: Ops specialists sit within product teams for deep context.
- Shared Service: A central team supports all squads on demand.
- Hybrid: The best of both—some embedded, some centralized for scale.
Most companies evolve their model as they grow.
Real-World Impact
The book is packed with examples—here are a few that stood out:
- Resolving product/sales conflicts with clear feature readiness statuses
- Building a single launch calendar for all product activities
- Centralizing customer insights and feedback
- Standardizing templates for discovery, strategy, and go-to-market
- Making resource allocation and capitalization transparent
Why This Book Matters (and Who Should Read It)
If you're leading a product team that's starting to "drown" in operations, or you see different parts of your org drifting out of sync, this book is a must-read. It's not about adding layers of process for the sake of it—it's about building the invisible systems that let your teams move fast and stay focused on what matters.
Product Operations isn't a luxury—it's the backbone of any scalable product organization. Like great infrastructure, you only notice it when it's missing.