146 / How To Use Product Ops To Make Better, Faster Decisions, with Denise Tilles

Product Momentum Podcast

Can Product Operations transform your role as a product manager? Denise Tilles, who quite literally wrote the book on the subject (Product Operations, with Melissa Perri), thinks so. Especially if you’re interested in making better decisions faster – and who of us isn’t?

In her return visit to Product Momentum (having joined us from NY Product Conference, back in April), Denise reveals to hosts Sean Flaherty, Paul Gebel, and a standing-room-only audience of Product + Design Conference attendees how Product Operations unlocks the value of our organizations’ collective work.

What Is Product Ops?

Product ops provides the essential systems and supports that capture, review, and analyze data.

“It’s really about surrounding product managers with the tools they need to make faster and better-quality decisions,” Denise offers. It’s based on three key pillars:

• Business + data insights. Quantitative measures like revenue, engagement, and market performance.
• Customer + user insights. Qualitative research about customers, users, and they markets they comprise.
• Processes + practices. Best practices and methods, combined with the systems thinking that complete your operating model.

“Product ops fine-tunes existing ways of working – not by being prescriptive, but by helping people understand how we work so we can work faster, smarter, and hopefully in a more pleasurable way,” Denise adds.

What Product Ops Is Not?

Product ops isn’t designed to take jobs away from product managers; nor does it seek to undermine their efforts. Product ops isn’t about building systems and processes for their own stake. And it isn’t necessarily a formalized role as much as it is an approach to efficient product building. In fact, as Paul suggests, “Even if we don’t have the title, even if we don’t have a product ops team, we can always bring a little bit of it to our daily work to make things a little bit better.”

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Be sure to check out the full conversation with Denise Tilles; if you prefer the video experience, you can find our episode with Denise on the Product Momentum YouTube channel!

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