Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yeah, I'll dive in. The customers started to come up and we started to feel it a bit more and I felt like there was this huge need for a voice of customer management and synthesis of both this qualitative and quantitative data as a theme that I saw arising across our customer base or even just folks that were reaching out about this role as they saw Pendo was putting it down. There was a lot of pain around internal alignment in general, transparency to stakeholders up across your revenue team members. Then for a lot of people during this time, growth was a massive propeller of the need for product ops. I remember just sitting here in this office and getting these random... Every industry almost was like, "Yeah, I'm thinking about doing this and I really need to do this, the pandemic, blah, blah, blah." Because it was growth during the pandemic, especially within industries such as home furnishings and making their living space a whole lot better. All of a sudden, we started to see that rise, but we were all experiencing this massive amount of growth across some of these startups and really rapidly growing companies. We're also moving more towards these product-led tactics, product-led growth. All of these things I feel like made this perfect storm for product operations to come in and start calming things down. I personally believe there's this natural evolution that happens at any mature function when it starts to grow in an industry and across an organization. So, think about marketing or sales. This just started to happen with product managers. For me, I was sitting there going, "Well, you can appoint a PM to liaise with other ops teams and the business, but at what risk?" Their product portfolio, the growth and adoption of their product, all these goals that they have to hit today in order to build a better tomorrow for their customers. So, I feel like that was the moment to say, "Okay, how do we give them the structure that they needed to thrive?" Because the CPO is in charge of so much more than product people have historically been in charge of, right? I'll probably talk about Marty Cagan several times here. I really do admire and respect him, and I think one of the things that he always talks about is future teams versus high performing teams and focusing on outcomes. CPOs went from deliver, deliver, deliver to really increased business metrics or just help drive the bottom line versus just really look at the product. You really have to figure out what that means for the product team at large. Got it. So, the way to think about this role, because I imagine most people haven't ever had a product ops person in their company is there's a slice of the PM role that companies are finding is valuable to put on a different person that has different skillsets that can take this endless load that PMs have. PMs have so many things to do and their job is so full of responsibilities that there's a sliver of stuff that a product ops person can take off. I'd be curious too and feel free to comment on that, but I'm also curious, you mentioned a few specific things that the product ops folks do. It'd be cool to just go through a bullet list of just those sorts of things, like you said, responsible for voice of the customer, pieces, alignment across stakeholders, whatever. If you could just go through some of those, that makes it really concrete I think for people to understand wow, this person that could have someone do all these for me, that'd be amazing. In some ways, I've got this question a lot from product managers who are concerned about the rise of this role or product leaders who are concerned that it was going to create some controversy or friction between product ops people and product managers. The way I've coached people to get around that is really, "What are your people responsible for? What are you holding them accountable to? Are you holding the product manager accountable to elevating these strategic insights so that they are going to elevate it to everyone else and then everyone else is going to go out there and build thing and drive the value or are you holding them accountable to truly understanding the customer in whatever way possible?" Especially going on and talking to the customer, please don't let anybody ever take that for granted. Really spending time with their engineers and the customers in order to drive a better experience. So, if they've got to spend all this time, which is our most valuable asset with those two entities, everything else still has to give. So, I think that yes, there was a point of friction, but I feel like now it's been a nice change where I'm seeing people in products saying, "No, I want to do product ops now," who was a former product manager. The second part of that, you said, let's go through the list of tactical things. Yes, voice of customer management is definitely one of the things that we're seeing more... I don't want to say mature because then I feel like I'm seeing mature of your peak, but the ones who have matured a bit, I feel like they are focusing more on the voice of customer elements. So, quantitative analysis, qualitative, bringing all of these different inputs that would traditionally be handled by product manager through looking across the aisle at their PM or looking at different data sources to the surface when they're going through their product development lifecycle planning, and really figuring out too what that balance is. I think there's an art. You can do voice of customer in two ways. You can do it one in this process way where you're feeding it to a really mature longstanding product team who has switchboard product or you have this voice of customer thing that you have to do for teams that are actually building something new. They're really trying to move fast, so how do you really get them what they need in order to experiment and iterate on the next thing that they're doing? That's one aspect. Another one is tooling. We see this more for folks who don't yet have tools under control in their product org. I'm not saying everybody has this, right? We had someone at one point handle whatever tools connected to Pendo and make sure that those systems are set up for maximum outcomes for the product manager. So, Pendo's connected to Salesforce. We're connected to Looker. We're connected to all these different.…

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