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

Melissa Perri is the CEO of Produx Labs, a product management training organization; author of the seminal PM book The Build Trap; and a former Harvard Business School professor of product management. Denise Tilles is the CPO at Grocket, Melissa’s colleague at Produx Labs, and a seasoned product leader with over a decade of experience. Together they authored the new book Product Operations: How successful companies build better products at scale. In today’s episode, they share insights, strategies, and real-world experiences to master all things product ops. We discuss:
• What exactly product operations is
• The three pillars of the product ops role
• The biggest benefits of adding product ops to your organization
• Which tasks product managers should offload to product ops and which they need to own
• How to help PMs embrace the value of product ops
• Examples of companies that have implemented product ops well
• Who and how to hire for this role

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Where to find Melissa Perri:

Where to find Denise Tilles:

Where to find Lenny:

In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) About our guests, Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles
(03:46) How common is the product operations role?
(07:41) The benefits of having a product ops person in your organization
(09:16) How to help PMs embrace the value of product ops
(11:44) The three pillars of the product ops role
(15:25) How user research fits in
(18:35) Why product ops will be an essential role for product managers to thrive
(24:24) Which tasks product managers should offload to product ops and which they need to own
(28:58) Project management vs. product ops
(29:44) The jobs of a product ops person
(37:38) Why the product ops role will never become obsolete
(39:31) How many product ops people you need
(45:13) First steps in building out a product ops team
(47:06) What to look for in your first hire
(51:11) Key skills needed for a product ops person
(57:29) Who product ops should report to
(59:50) An example of rolling out product ops at Athena Health
(1:09:35) Lightning round

Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

[ShahedKhalili]

This is why I love Lenny. Back-to-back episodes with one leader who says less product management, and ones who say more product management. There is no one size fit all approach. Love it. Keep the ideas flowing Lenny.

[hcubill]

What a product leader Melissa is. It’s breathtaking to see her express her opinions with such clarity.❤

[Al-whhw]

That's the exact question I also ask at interviews that Melissa asks.. Speaking about failures tells so much about a person's growth mindset, and being comfortable about the messy. Thanks very much Lenny ❤

[ramon-chanco]

"Product Ops are the Product Managers for the Product Managers"

Just want to underline this. Super concise framework for thinking about product ops. Love it.

[hasaab]

Great inspiration!

Love to connect with Mellisa and Denise on this topic - super use full discussion

[productsofmusic]

Great content as always, Lenny 🔥 Great to see contrasting views episode to episode.

[swarupae]

Wow, very enlightening and engaging episode.

[zebramatt]

I think the middle pillar - qualitative insights, user research - is chronically undervalued, hence why it doesn't feature highly in orgs' goals when establishing ProdOps in the first place.

"I don't know how my product is performing" and "I can't see whether my budgets are being spent efficiently" are both very visible problems. "Am I actually building the right product" is at the very heart of Product Management, but is a less visible problem to the business.

Maturity of Product Ops plays a role here. Once you can see how well things are performing, and your processes are transparent and efficient, THEN the problem of how you decide what bets to take becomes front of mind.

[AngelaFerrari-vo]

Thank you very much for this great video! :) I am looking for trainings and best practices on Portfolio Management. Any advice?

[eugenkolbey]

so sad to watch that company establish "product ops", so CFO and CPO can talk to each other, Chesky did a better job making huge company more aglie and aligned, that "product ops" motion. Thank you Lenny, it's always great and important to hear from the author.

[jsj]

when 2 of your biggeest role models in Product Manager come in 1 video - Lenny and Melissa ! <3

[praveensg]

Works great for large corporations. Smaller companies cannot afford this level of staffing and you will need to roll up your sleeves to deal with all aspects of product. And that's the only way to learn than by just delegating.

[vanaconsulting]

I'm thinking (out loud) this may transform into a central "Rev Ops" groups that owns revenue data, product usage, customer feedback, NPS, win/loss data, user research etc. - synthesizes and provides this data to Product/Marketing/Sales teams.

[georgialin]

Product Ops sounds like an assistant with a fancier name. What is the career path of a Product Ops person, and what are the benefits and growth opportunities for someone who may not have decision-making power but needs to handle all the trivial tasks?

[hrahman]

I feel like this new vertical of product ops is open to be automated by AI. Essentially every PM has a Product Ops AI asistant that connects with all your internal & external data and have a coversation about it to help guide the PM. I'm sure its more complicated than that but I can't think of a reason why this wouldn't happen.

[bertilhatt]

I was very surprised by the content of this episode:

- What you describe here is generally part of the *product analyst* role; there are variations, but for example, gathering data from production databases (what Melissa calls “MongoDB“) is even two other roles: Data engineering and Analytics Engineering. There are also overlaps with User eXperience Research, as pointed out, but those are also clearly distinct roles.

[siddhantsingh]

I have a bad feeling about this growth wise for PMs.

We are pushing them away from all the different areas they would communicate with and give that to Product Ops.

[Techzi-co]

Isn't 'product ops' what a lot of companies call 'junior PM's?"

sounds like the lead-in position to being a PM

[olowoporoku]

A good agile coach will not run customer research and product discovery activities like scrum. facilitated workshops will be a better option