Christine Itwaru: evaluation

Transcript context

…Got it. It feels like there's been this big inflection and emergence of the role in the past couple years, past few years. I'm curious what you think triggered that and if that's true, if it feels like it's just emerged in the last couple years and then just like why do you think that has happened? This is interesting, because as a former product manager and product leader, I don't think that things are new. Absolutely. When I go back to the story about Ben, I'm like, "No, none of this stuff feels really interesting and it's just stuff that we had to deal with in product." So, the problems have always been there. I think maybe that is because I have a product background. So, I felt that pain very acutely, but I will say for the majority of people I always speak to who don't have that product background, they're coming from consulting or from technical success or from some other group marketing maybe, it does feel relatively new because they're starting to dive into that space a little bit. But I will say that for me in particular at Pendo, it was the summer of 2019 that this really picked up and I remember a colleague of mine, shout out to Shannon. He's no longer with us, but he is one of the original people on the Pendo product team. He said, "I think this is the summer of the birth of product ops." I just started laughing and he was like, "I'm telling you, it's everywhere." All of a sudden, everybody's just like, "We need something. We need to make product better." I thought that was awesome because we had already started talking about it. [NEW_PARAGRAPH]So, it took me a bit to understand what was going on across tech that was making this thing so big. I'm very grateful because we have so many great customers that reach out and say, "Help us understand how you're doing this." I'm like, "Well, help me understand what's going on." So, for me, it went beyond the problems that we would solve as a product team with the Pendo product. It went into, "How can we help you as an organization solve pain that you're feeling within your product team that trickles out to the business?" That's interesting. That was the summer of product ops. What happened there? Why was there a summer of product ops? Why was everyone starting to get excited and creating product ops teams?…

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