A quick roundup of the things I’ve been reading and enjoying this week
From Outputs to Outcomes: Bridging the Four Gaps
Itamar Gilad
Start using outcome goals right now where you can. For example if the mindset is ripe in some parts of the company, say certain product teams, start there. If you don’t have the infrastructure to run A/B experiments, start discovering your product using surveys, customer interviews, and fake door tests. Don’t wait for some “big-fix” that will take ages and may not really fix anything.
The Product Strategy Stack
Reforge: Ravi Mehta and Zainab Ghadiyali
Over time, a poorly defined strategy weighs heavily on a strong team. The lack of clarity makes a team’s work burdensome. They may lose pride in shipping a product that feels unfocused, or feel defeated as diminishing returns set in. They may feel they are not getting the context and resources they need from leadership. Eventually, high performers will churn if they don’t believe in or can’t understand the strategy.
Product Operations - Where to Begin
The Product Heart - Christine Itwaru
All of the above leads me to the first rule of Product Ops. Establish trust. We felt the trust being built with both customer sets through this first move. I can’t stress how critical this is for Product Ops. This is a highly cross-functional role where you are in the center of so much. Establishing trust is non-negotiable.
Understanding the role of product ops.
Lenny’s Podcast
I ended up on this post after hearing this great episode Christine on Lenny’s Podcast on Product Operations.
I’ve had many ways of describing this in the past and it generally centered around the ladder of what I’m going to tell you or the second part of this, but I’m breaking it down now 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 system that allows you to thrive or allows your team to thrive in product management. The second is what we’ve seen more of over the last couple years, and it’s the more common definition.
The emergence of the role 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 products. So, your CPO or your VP again. When it comes to data, qualitative, quantitative, anything that they feel can help the CPO or the head of product make more strategic decisions and well-informed decisions.