Oftentimes, I hear people say that back in the day product managers used to run product on gut feeling, but now we have the technology to inform ourselves with data. This is not a matter of old ways and new ways. Rather, it is a matter of the state of the company and the level of unknowns you can afford to eliminate.
A Startup CEO is less likely to form a product operations team. While data and processes could benefit decision-making, at this stage, the extent of investments a CEO can afford for automation combining cross-departmental data is limited. At a Startup, the focus is on product-market fit, and driving efficiency within each department is the priority. Does that mean that Startups cannot benefit from Product Operations all together?
Not at all! Startup CEO’s should adopt systems to start collecting important data early on. There are a plethora of SaaS tools that fit every budget and address key business functions to help avoid notorious Excel tracking and have a basic reporting on key metrics.
At Scaleups, the CEO cares about growth, the multiples of the return, and the revenue impact of every decision. That is when Product Ops outputs best correlate with the business outcomes. This is the time to organize and formulate a Product Operations team. By gathering all your intelligence and combining the different perspectives, you can see your product portfolio and your business in parallel.
You gain clarity on strategic choices and you empower the organization to be in sync.
Product operations is not only meant for product managers to prioritize features or backlog. Product Operations is for the entire organization to be aligned in steering the boat towards the most growth. By combining data from all parts of the business: finance, sales, product, etc, Product Operations enables to distill insights to answer questions like:
- Are you doing the things you set out to?
- Are the things you do, working for you?
- Are you doing the things you should be doing?
Imagine being able to answer these 3 questions from the angle of every single module that contributes to your growth. How much more confident an investment case on each part of your product portfolio will be!
