Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

by Melissa Perri

In larger organizations, you need the same thing, but at scale. We call this team product operations. In growth stage companies, a chief of staff (under the CPO, like in Marquetly), runs it. In larger organizations, the product operations team still reports to the CPO but it needs an experienced leader, usually at the VP level, to oversee it. This team is in charge of streamlining all operational and process work that product teams need to be successful. This includes: Create automated and streamlined ways to collect data on progress toward goals and outcomes across teams. Report on goals, outcomes, roadmaps, progress, capacity, and costs across the product organization, translating these activities into financial implications for the company executives. Set up and maintain a product analytics platform to report on product engagement metrics across the organization. Standardize product processes that go across teams, such as strategy cadences, experimentation tracking and feedback, documentation on product features, collecting data, setting goals, creating and maintaining roadmaps, and sales enablement. Organize and run critical product meetings for strategy creation, strategy deployment, and releases. Conduct any coaching or training for the product teams.

They are not dictating whether a team can talk to users. They are creating systems that help teams figure out which users to target for their experimentation.

A product operations team is a critical component to a well-run product organization at scale. It promotes good communication and alignment of the organization. But these things alone do not automatically produce a product mindset throughout the company. Reporting on outcomes can start to change behavior, but frequently, I’ve seen companies get this far and hit a wall. That’s because they often change their processes, while continuing to reward people for the old ways of working.

This can start the right dialogue. Talk to your bosses about what success really means. Define your metrics for when you know you will be done. Use this framework to spark the conversation in your reviews. And always come with data.

If you are a leader at a company, it’s time to reevaluate how you are incentivizing people. You should be rewarding people for moving the business forward — achieving outcomes, learning about your users, and finding the right business opportunities. At the end of the day, the rest is just vanity metrics.

You might not be judging your teams for success based only on outputs, but they may still not be willing to try new things. Why? There may not be enough safety in the organization to fail and learn.

I want to be clear here: it is not a success if you fail and do not learn. Learning should be at the core of every product-led organization. It should be what drives us as an organization.

If you are a product manager, think about how you can change your message to your boss and begin to gain trust by working this way. If you are a manager, be open to the possibility that new ways of working are also beneficial and be ready to help your product manager establish boundaries, rather than saying no to them. And, finally, if you are an executive, think about how you can create safe spaces for people to learn.

One of the most famous Jeff Bezos quotes about how Amazon succeeds is, “The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.”

Who came up with the last feature or product idea you built?

What was the last product you decided to kill?

When’s the last time you talked with your customers?

What is your goal?

What are you currently working on?

What are your product managers like?