The ultimate guide to product operations | Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles

Do you want to hire 10,000 product managers and let them all do these things off the side of their desk (laughs) and then concentrate on strategic work, like, 30% of the time? Or do you want them concentrating on strategic work majority of the time and then help build a product operations team around them that can create these shared systems and this infrastructure to allow them to work better?

(instrumental music) Today my guests are Melissa Perri and Denise Tillis. This is a rare two-guest episode. Melissa and Denise are authors of an awesome new book called Product Operations: How Successful Companies Build Better Products at Scale. Melissa is a legend in the product management community. She's the author of the foundational PM book, Escaping the Build Trap. She runs a product management training organization called Productslabs, teaches product management at Harvard, and has worked with hundreds of companies on their product management function. Denise is a product leader, coach, and consultant, helping companies with their product vision, strategy, and execution, and works with Melissa at Productslabs. In our conversation, we get super deep into the emerging role of product ops. As you'll hear in our conversation, over the past few years, this role has gone from almost nonexistent to something like half of scaling tech companies with at least one product ops person. This new role is probably the thing that's most changing in the world of product management, and after this conversation, I'm convinced it's a great thing. We chat about what the role concretely is, how it differs from product management and project management, what to look for in your first product ops hire, how to roll out a product ops function, why product managers shouldn't be afraid of this role, and how your life gets significantly better, plus a case study on how they rolled out product ops function at a large company, and so much more. With that, I bring you Melissa Perri and Denise Tillis after a short word from our sponsor. You fell in love with building products for a reason, but sometimes the day-to-day reality is a little different than you imagined. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers, and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing Jira Product Discovery, the new prioritization and road mapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian. With Jira Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds, and it's all built on Jira, where your engineering teams are already working, so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers. Sales, support, leadership, even Greg from finance. Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback, and insights in Jira Product Discovery for free. No catch. And it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and their never-ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible with Jira Product Discovery. Try it for free at atlassian.com/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny. Melissa and Denise, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.