An Overview of ProductOps

What is ProductOps?
Discipline, Experiences, & Best Practices
Uday Kumar
Chief Digital Ofﬁcer
Akira Technologies
www.akira-tech.com

Agenda
● What is ProductOps?
● What does ProductOps do?
● How to get started with ProductOps?

My Tech Roles My Product Roles

ProductOps is an operational
function that optimizes the
intersection of product,
engineering, and customer
success.
- Pendo

Why Is ProductOps Important?
● Product is focal
point for each stage
of customer journey
● ProductOps is key to
the optimization of
that experience

ProductOps Topics
● ARBs & Decision Trackers
● ReImagined Sessions (2 days, disposable POCs)
● Weekly 10/10s (manager, directs)
● Org OKRs & Functional OKRs (Data, Decisioning,
Partnerships)
● Weekly Product & Tech LT Sync
● Roadmap Check-ins
● PI Pre-Planning & Planning (every 6 weeks)
● Monthly Platform Readouts
● Monthly Context Sharing (internal)
● Monthly Roadmap walk-throughs (Credit, Fraud, Card
Controls)
● MBRs & QBRs
● S1 (team), S2 (team leads), S3 (pltfrm leads), S4 (org leads)
● Weekly Intake Meetings
● Recognition, Milestones, Wins, Spot Awards
● Platform NPS
● Splunk & Datadog Dashboards
● PagerDuty Alerts
● Daily Data & Decisioning Metrics
● Slack channels - Prod Support, Pre-Release, Release, etc.
● Product & Process Documentation
● Production Issues Log
● Monthly Auth Newsletter
● Issue, Impact, Resolution, Communication Write-ups
● Risk Events, Issues, Anomalies Reporting
● Seamless Engineer Experience
● Strategy Readouts - Federation, Convergence, etc.

Tools
Escalation / Issues
Data
Cross-Communication
Experimentation Strategy

Tools
Similar to other OPS roles, product ops
manages the product tools and
processes, and ensures team
members are using them effectively.
The product ops team works to ensure
the tools in place help the product
management organization operate
eﬃciently.
Manage Product Tech Stack
01
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03
04
03
Drive Continuous Process
Improvement
04
Establish Internal Best
Practices
02
Ensure Effective Use of
Tools
03

Collect & Analyze Product
Usage Data
01
03
04
03
Collect & Analyze Support
Tickets
04
Collect & Analyze Customer
Feedback via NPS Surveys
02
Collect & Analyze Feature
Requests
03
Data
Product ops collects, organizes, and
analyzes quantitative and qualitative
product data and enables the entire
organization to make the most of their
insights.
All of this, plus general feedback from
customers, helps us to create a
product roadmap whereby decisions
and priorities are heavily inﬂuenced by
our customers’ feedback.

Handle Highest Priority
Issues
01
03
04
03
Make Product Support
Effective
04
Understand Customer
Health Metrics
02
Update Product
Documentation & Runbooks
03
Escalation / Issues
The product ops team works with
escalations and issues by partnering
with the technical success team every
day.
This also includes understanding the
effectiveness of Prod Support teams
and make them smarter, leaner.

Clarify Value of Product
01
03
04
03
Partner with Revenue Team
04
Help Customers Meet their
Goals
02
Provide Product Information
to Key Decision Makers
03
Cross-Communication
Cross-communication is one of the
most important aspects of a product
operations role. It involves
collaboration with support
stakeholders.
Our customers are the ultimate goal.
We want to meet our own goals, and
also help our customers to meet
theirs.

Identify & Prioritize Worthy
Experiments
01
03
04
03
Drive Innovation Eﬃciency
04
Sequence & Track All
Experiments
02
Determine Experiment
Success and/or Learnings
03
Experimentation
Experimentation is the path to
Innovation. Experiments help us
brainstorm new strategies, new ideas,
and new ways to grow.
Product ops helps eliminate friction
within the product experimentation
process and track results / ﬁndings.

Foster Cross-Departmental
Collaboration
01
03
04
03
Identify & Fill Knowledge
Gaps
04
Identify Areas for
Improvement
02
Partner with Marketing for
Effective Launch of
Features
03
Strategy
Product ops inﬂuences stakeholder
collaboration around the product and
uses their product insights to inform
business decisions.
Product ops also ensures stakeholders
understand core functionality and new
releases.

Is ProductOps a New Discipline?

Not Really. It is a discipline that now
has a formal title however product
orgs have been using these practices
for the past 2 decades.

How does one get started with Product Ops?
How to bring it into the Org?

It depends on your org context and maturity
● Odds are you are already doing some of it
● Depends on the size and scale of your product org
● Start by hiring a process or data analyst
● It's more ART than SCIENCE (relative to DevOps, etc.)
● You probably already have the tools (JIRA, Conﬂuence, Figma, etc.)
● Prioritize what are the most important product ops tasks for your context
● Remember: The Product Manager and Product Team are your customers
○ Ask, Observe, Shadow to learn their pain points and KPIs
○ Build a strategy and plan to make them successful

A quick thought on my Product
Management approach …

1. Problem
2. Context
3. Innovation
4. Outcomes
5. Partnership
6. Celebration
7. Growth

Thanks!
Uday Kumar
Chief Digital Oﬃcer
Akira Technologies
Washington, DC 20006
ukumar@akira-tech.com
www.akira-tech.com

An Overview of ProductOps

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