Christine Itwaru: commitment

Transcript context

…Cool. Yeah, Marty Cagan has some hot takes there about how product owners are never going to be great product managers. They don't really understand the customer needs and building product in any way. That's a whole other topic. I want to talk about the career path, but before we get there, I want to go in a spicy direction. So, Casey Winners, he is a guest on this podcast at one point. He wrote this hot take many years ago about this premise that operations in general often is a Band-Aid for inefficiency at a company. Companies often hire a bunch of ops people to just solve a problem and often they're much better ways to solve that problem. For example, tooling or a new process. His take is a person doing the thing often should be the last resort or it's a temporary gap and then over time you should strive to find a more efficient way to solve that problem than people. I don't think he's saying ops people in general or not necessary. It's an easy default. So, I'm curious what you think of that take. Generally, do you think product ops is this long term we're going to need more and more of this or is there a different path that's solving the problem that product ops? Spicy take warning. Yes, I remember this. I'll address that inefficiency comment first, right? I mentioned a little bit earlier as roles in any industry or I guess any role matures like marketing or sales, this ops thing ends up being this natural progression. It's not just because the role itself is maturing. It's also because the org is maturing. So, what I found and what I'm finding with customers is that ops alignment across companies is what often ends up keeping the companies moving and keeping everybody aligned. So, to say ops teams are generally a sign of inefficiency or the need for them is a sign of inefficiency is not always accurate, it's generally a sign of growth and opportunity. People are really just trying to stay in aligned and do the best for the people that are doing the thing, the product managing, the marketing, the selling within that org. Overall though, I will say I will agree with his points about getting in and maybe giving it off and using humans for other things. I wrote something recently and I highlighted something that he mentions here in this article and what he mentioned on your podcast, which is we as product ops want to and should be standing up whatever processes or systems are needed and then get out of the way so we can focus on driving more strategic value. I keep mentioning that more mature product ops folks end up being a very good strategic advisor to leaders in product and to the product teams and that continues to be my belief. From day one, this has been my own personal goal for myself and for my team. I myself recently switched roles here at Pendo because I did what I said I was going to do, which was stand up the system, stand up the things that we knew we needed to do that were going to either be given off to another team or automated and then get the rest of the humans that are here to do the other strategic things for the product team. Some of those are, "How do we increase retention? Like I mentioned, how do we focus on growth in this one area? How do we make the experience better in app? How do we do a better voice of customer management?" My energy now at Pendo is I'm able to now go towards more impactful things for not just the product team and the product community, but for our customers at large. So, I'm basically saying, "Look, I did what I needed to do and I'm ready to go." So I think that's something though that people need to be very, very comfortable with, very comfortable with. If you change course and change your tune two, three years into doing this and you built this team, you're like, "Here's what you're doing, manage this process," people are going to lose their mind. Change is constant, but telling someone, "I no longer need you to do that," it makes them a little bit nervous. So, for years when I was interviewing folks from my team, I made that one point abundantly clear to them, get into this role if you're comfortable letting go of things and moving on to something that is well worth your time. interviewing folks from my team, I made that one point abundantly clear to them, get into this role if you're comfortable letting go of things and moving on to something that is well worth your time. The company's going to change. Our process is going to need to be tweaked. The company is going to change. Something's going to need to be automated. We're going to need to cut something else. Maybe ChatGPT is going to make things very clear that humans are not always going to be doing the same things and we need to focus our energy elsewhere, but people do need to get comfortable with that role.…

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