I talked in the last newsletter about identifying your shadow product operations organization. These are the people who are busy doing the work of product ops without it being a formal part of their job description. They’re trying to figure out how your product management team can work more effectively, make better decisions, and achieve more.
Having been a shadow product ops person myself, I can tell you it isn’t sustainable. I was trying to figure out ways to improve our roadmapping process and selling the other PMs on the new process. Meanwhile, I had the rest of my job to do: loop in stakeholders, build out my own roadmap, make sure my engineering partners had everything they needed, and manage my direct reports. The process work needed to happen, but it felt squeezed in and I was constantly teetering on the edge of burnout.
My own experience led to my conviction that we need to bring shadow product ops work into the light. We can’t continue to expect product managers and product leaders to make the work magically happen alongside their other responsibilities.
~Jenny
Shine a light
Once you’ve identified who is doing the work and what it is, it’s time to shine that light.
Shining a light starts with simply thanking your team members doing the work. From there, define this work as part of their job description or in a new role. And if you need to put ops work to the side for now, be explicit about it. These three actions will help you show that you care about improving your teams’ efficiency and effectiveness and are a worthwhile investment in your product culture.
Say thank you and acknowledge the impact
I asked a number of people how they like to be acknowledged for product ops work, and it’s amazing what a “thank you” can do. Everyone I spoke with brought up the impact that public acknowledgement had on them. It doesn’t just make them feel good, but also adds credibility to their work. This increases the likelihood that their initiative will succeed.
As Jessica Castro put it:
For me, the appreciation comes from thank you said either with words directly to me or indirectly when business, tech or product talks actively about how their life has improved or how business had good results due to a project I’ve helped deliver or a change in processes.
Make sure your thank you acknowledges:
1. Who did the work
2. What the work was
3. The impact it had
Make it part of the job
One challenge with shadow ops work is it happens alongside and on top of all the other product management responsibilities. Instead, make it part of the job.
This can happen in two basic ways: make it part of the explicit expectations for all product leaders in their job descriptions or formalize it with a new role. Either way, write down what the work is and make sure that if it’s getting added to someone’s list that something else is being taken away.
Attach the work to goals or OKRs
Once you’ve asked someone to do the work, make sure the work is actually being tracked. It doesn’t feel great to do work and then to be unsure if the work is actually helping you meet your company goals.
Tie your product ops work to your goal-tracking system so it’s clear that the work is valued. Connect the work to the impact on your journey to becoming more product-led.
Deliberately de-prioritize the work
If you aren’t able to do the above, then it’s probably a sign that the work needs to be explicitly de-prioritized. Be gracious about this, as someone has poured a lot of effort into investing in this area of your organization. Explain why it needs to be de-prioritized, and what the priorities are instead. Think through the risks of de-prioritization, and make sure you’re aligned on what the tradeoffs are going to be. If you decide to try and squeeze it in instead, you run the risk of neither intiative being done well.
What kind of culture do you want
I constantly advocate that product ops defines product culture. How you recognize and react to the work that your team is doing to change and improve your product culture adds another dimension to it.
The people doing this work are the people who want to change your product culture. They are trying to make it more customer-oriented, more data-driven, more collaborative. How you react to them makes a statement around where your priorities are in terms of your organization’s culture.
Making sure to publicly thank people who are putting in hard work that has an impact is another way to define your team culture. Your interpersonal style as a leader will rub off on others as well.
Set an example of the culture you want by shining a light on the work your team is doing to build a great culture. This will increase the likelihood your employees stick around and reduce the risk of burnout. In the process, you’ll be creating a community where everyone feels appreciated, and that’s always a good culture to build.