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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.
Same with research. I hear this question all the time, who should research report to, and there’s a big debate in the UXR community about it. But it just depends on the specific environment. Same for frameworks (even the prioritization framework I teach) - the general structure can work, but it needs to be personalized to the environment.
A thought this triggers ... what do you do when the culture is changing / in flux
Interesting. This reminds me of the Conway's Law. "The structure of the system reflects the structure of organization".
Yes-institutionalize and sustain allows for scale.
Operations Management specializing in business and process transformation. Pragmatist.
4wI love this approach. We need to start with an understanding of what the right things are (reducing dependencies, categorizing work for visibility to WIP) but there are many different ways of achieving those things. You need to make the time, or hire people who can make the time, to go work with each team to find out what's working and what's not. For example I've had a situation where the way a team was working in Jira was the exact opposite of what I was going to recommend, but it was accomplishing all of the things it needed to. In that case as a change agent I'm way better off to put the onus on myself to figure out how to make their way work in the tool, than to force them to do it my way. This is such a big deal that for a while I stopped calling myself a process person because most people think of process as someone handing down a one size fits all approach, and doing that always causes problems for the people doing the work.