Jenny Wanger’s Post

I am a stronger product manager because I think operationally. Many of the best product managers do. A systems-oriented mindset offers three key advantages: 𝗕𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀. I’m not designing features, we’re designing experiences. When I examine the bigger picture, I see how the pieces fit together. This helps me make better choices. 𝗨𝗻𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻. Systems thinking introduces the theory of bottlenecks and has helped me look at the opportunities in improving my metrics so I can strategically target the highest-potential areas to improve results. 𝗘𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀. Developers are not machines in a factory. But knowing about successful manufacturing has helped me understand where in our development systems there are problems that need addressing and to what urgency. Specializing in product operations has made this knowledge even more relevant. I encourage every product manager to develop some operational know-how. How has an operations mindset helped you be a better product manager? 

You want a clearer vision for your product organization’s culture. I am refining a workshop on this topic. Your product leadership team will need to commit 90 minutes to running the workshop with me and 10 minutes to providing feedback on it so I can continue to improve. At the end of the workshop, you’ll have a product culture blueprint, a description of where you want to take your product org. You will be able to use it to onboard new hires, motivate company changes, and drive your product operations forward. It’s helpful for all product organizations, whether or not you have a product operations team. If you’re ready to get your product culture down on paper, comment below.

When writing documentation, don’t treat your readers like idiots. Welcome to my oven's instruction manual. A designer spent time making the graphics. A copywriter painstakingly shaped each line. The sad thing? Nobody has ever used these instructions. A few tips for writing better documentation: __Make it specific__ This doesn’t work because it tries to cover every use case that has ever been made for an oven. __Write for real people__ This document apparently assumes someone who owns an oven has never used one before. __Focus on the hard part__ The documentation ends with “start cooking”, but that’s actually the hard part and where the documentation should focus. There are times when you really want foolproof processes and instructions. But remember that there is such a thing as too much documentation. 

How do you help your company navigate product changes? “Give them the why up front.” We were so lucky to have Christine Itwaru join us for the final session of Reforge’s Product Ops & Infrastructure class. She shared some of her experience shaping product culture at Pendo.io and Vitally.io Highlights from the case study: 📚 Start by asking the product team open-ended questions. “What's going on?” “How much time are you spending on x/y/z?”. 🎣Then, poll "the other side" of the company ➡️ what do your partners need from product to succeed in their roles? 🐾 Meet people where they are: A weekly release digest worked really well as a first major change because it lived in tools and workflows the company was already using. 🛠️ Bring in tooling at the right time - Sometimes, a tool can be a solution to a problem, but it won’t succeed because it doesn’t fit the current state of the company. 💸 New tooling can be very expensive because you have to educate everyone on how to interpret the data and change their workflows. The cost goes beyond the subscription. ⏱️ Try the Fast Forward exercise - What do I want the product team to look like/feel like a year from now? 2 years? How do you get there? 👤 If something is important enough and you can prove an outcome, it’s probably worth dedicating a human to that effort. Overall, she showed us some very strong examples of how to apply a product mindset to product operations – if you understand the problem well, make sure your solution fits into your users workflows, and focus on small, iterative changes, you’ll see success.

Here’s everything you need to know to succeed in product ops: 🔘 Make sure your strategy aligns with the company strategy 🔘 Focus on creating the best product culture for your company 🔘 Make sure your infrastructure choices fit your strategy 🔘 Always bring a product mindset Easy, right? Not at all. That's why I just wrapped up 4 deep dive sessions covering these topics for my course on Reforge. I created this video to help you get a taste of all that we covered. What’s on your list of things you need to know?

Your company culture and your approach to product operations are inevitably intertwined. The better you understand your company culture, the stronger your implementation of product operations will be. Sanchan S Saxena joined the most recent session of Reforge's Product Operations and Infrastructure to discuss how he approached Product Ops as a leader at Airbnb and Coinbase. He ended up implementing a separate product ops team at one company and not the other. As he put it: “What you want to do as a founder and the operator is to institutionalize your culture so that when people come on board, they understand the nuances of it. The worst thing to do is for a VP of Product to come from Google or Facebook and say, “At Google, we had this way of doing things and we're going to do it the same way at this new startup.” That's actually a recipe for failure because every company, every culture has its own unique aspect.” Some other key learnings: - You’ve got a vision for your product culture, but need the strategy to describe how you’re going to get there. - There are more well-defined paths for product operations to find strategies that work – it isn’t about creating competitive white space like in product strategy. - There isn’t an optimal way to do product operations. It all depends on the company context. - Your strategy needs to align well with the resources (headcount, budget) you have available to you. There is no right strategy for every org. Our work is to figure out the right thing to do next within the current context of our product, market, and organization. I’ll be thinking about how the design-driven culture at Airbnb led to product ops being integrated into product leadership. On the other hand, the data-first asynchronous culture at Coinbase made having a product ops team far more effective. 

Setting a vision for your product culture is not easy. But 32 people have their next steps. This is just a sample of what they committed to doing after our discussion in the first session of my Product Ops & Infrastructure course on Reforge. Here are some of the key takeaways: 1️⃣ Product Operations is product managing the product management experience. What is the product mindset that underlies the product culture you want to build? You need to decide this before making broad infrastructure changes. 2️⃣ There isn’t one flavor of product culture, it comes in many forms. Figuring out how to talk about it helps clarify your activities and can have additional benefits around recruiting and inspiring employees. 3️⃣ Interviews and surveys are different tools that serve different purposes to inform your product operations research and prioritization. They’re best when they build upon each other. 4️⃣ Product leaders tend to want an “everything” product culture: data-driven, collaborative, cross-functional, user-centered, etc. But in reality they need to prioritize between these. - What product culture do you currently have? - How do you find out? - How do you communicate your findings? - What product culture do you want to have? 5️⃣ Product ops helps teams grow in a healthy direction. To get everyone on the same page, stay focused on the future culture that you want. 6️⃣ Incremental improvements are better than nothing at all. Use your Product Culture Blueprint as the vision as the why, so that you can grow your team towards success! If you’re interested in joining our next session (Thursday) with Sanchan S Saxena to talk about product operations strategy, drop a note here and I’ll help you get signed up. Thank you to everyone who participated in today’s session – this is going to be a great cohort!

Every product manager I coach at some point in time needs to navigate feature requests from stakeholders. Stakeholders say: “I could win this deal if only our product had... “ “I really think we need the product to do... “ Stakeholder requests are a headache. They're an amazing opportunity. The problem with stakeholder requests is that many product managers take the suggestions at face value and park it in the backlog. The opportunity comes from reframing the situation. Instead, use it as a way to help your stakeholders develop their own product mindset. Next time a stakeholder comes to you with a feature idea, sit down with them for 10 minutes and translate it into a user problem. Figure out what success metrics would look like. Brainstorm different ways to solve the problem. A much better outcome than yet another idea gathering dust in the backlog.

I loved running the Product Ops Impact Accelerator. But I wanted it to be better. So I invested another 40 hours into improving it. I’ve revamped it into “Product Ops & Infrastructure”, which I’m launching with Reforge this June. It’s designed to help you: - Understand the current state of your product operations. - Research, define, and sell a compelling vision for your team’s future state. - Develop a strategy for how to support and sustain your vision. - Choose the infrastructure that is most likely to work for you. Craft a plan to successfully deploy infrastructure that maximizes the impact you’ll have on how you work. Join me starting Tuesday to learn how to treat your team as a product so you can spend your time delivering the outcomes that matter. https://lnkd.in/gNC9AUKf