Why it took off post-2020
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I didn’t even know that product operations was a term for the work I was doing until long after I had started doing it.
My first foray into product ops was at SpotHero when I got involved in product leadership. I found myself responsible not only for what we were building, but how we were building it. I didn’t have words to describe this work I was doing.
It was only when I entered product operations consulting that I became familiar with the term. I’ve never actually held an official “product operations” title.
Something significant happened between when I left SpotHero in 2020 and when I began consulting in 2022. The term became widely known.
I often get asked why product operations has become its own discipline and role. It existed well before 2020 but in terms of interest and open roles has really only taken off since then.
The rise of product operations didn’t happen overnight. It started with changing expectations around what product managers should focus on, then the pandemic created three specific challenges that made dedicated operational support essential.
Understanding these drivers matters more than just historical curiosity. If you’re in product ops, this framework helps you articulate your value when leadership questions your role’s necessity. If you’re a product leader, recognizing these patterns helps you decide whether to invest in dedicated product ops support or integrate these responsibilities into existing roles.
Most importantly, our work has fundamentally changed since 2020, and it’s not changing back. The companies that acknowledge this and build intentional product operations— whether through dedicated roles or embedded practices— will outperform those that assume they can return to pre-pandemic ways of working.
We weren’t struggling to build products before product operations emerged as a discipline. But as we and our work environments have evolved, product operations has risen to meet new challenges. Let’s examine each of these five drivers individually.
Product management expectations were already shifting
One trend that has remained steady from pre-pandemic times through today is the evolution of expectations for successful product managers.
Previously, there was higher tolerance for product managers to spend time on operational tasks as part of their daily work. But as the product management role has evolved to focus more intensely on business and customer value, we’ve recognized that product operations falls outside what can reasonably be expected of a single individual.
It has become more accepted to separate product operations work from core product management, allowing both functions to have greater focus, less work in progress, and more impact. But there was still great hesitation towards adopting product operations.
Then the pandemic hit.
The co-location illusion
When we were all co-located full-time in the office, I often discovered new initiatives through casual water cooler conversations. A quick coffee chat with someone from marketing might reveal a new brand message that would influence how I positioned features on my roadmap.
The problem was that we were running entire companies on these chance encounters. While it worked, it relied heavily on each product manager’s networking abilities within the organization.
When the pandemic hit and we all went remote, these informal networks collapsed. Despite attempts to recreate them through Slack channels and direct messages, the spontaneous exchange of information was never quite the same.
Product operations had a new role to play as the ones who would pay attention to deliberately designing communication channels inside a company, even in a remote setting.
In some cases this looked like product hubs or calendar notes. In others, it looked like better roadmaps and formal planning meetings.
But it takes effort to design new ways of communicating with each other. And that’s why a bunch of companies said, you know what, we can’t have this responsibility on top of all the others that’s bringing product operations.
The meeting fatigue
Remote work brought with it an explosion of video meetings. We’ve all experienced Zoom fatigue— that mental exhaustion from spending hours communicating with other humans exclusively through a screen.
Calendars quickly became overloaded. People scheduled meeting after meeting, desperately trying to replace the spontaneous information sharing they’d lost.
Product ops stepped in to tackle this meeting mess. They ran meeting audits to eliminate unnecessary gatherings, added agendas and processes to make remaining meetings shorter and more effective, and moved appropriate communication to asynchronous channels.
For critical meetings, product ops also began serving as dedicated facilitators, ensuring meetings ran smoothly because someone’s sole focus was managing the meeting itself rather than participating in the content.
The specialized tool explosion
For years, product teams made do with tools designed for other functions—engineering systems, design platforms, or basic productivity tools like spreadsheets and documents.
More recently, specialized product management tools allow teams to work more effectively by supporting workflows unique to product development.
As remote work took hold, teams began adopting these product management tools to facilitate the communication patterns they’d lost in the transition away from office environments.
However, this proliferation of product-specific tools creates a new challenge: someone needs to own, manage, administer, and configure these various platforms.
This creates another compelling case for product operations. The more tools we adopt specifically for product management, the more we need dedicated people to manage them effectively.
The Product Operations book
While not directly pandemic-related, the final accelerator for product operations was the publication of Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles’ book, Product Operations, in 2023.
The book didn’t create the product ops movement— all the factors I’ve outlined were already driving adoption. Instead, it provided a framework and vocabulary that helped teams understand what they were already experiencing and gave them language to articulate their needs.
This created tremendous awareness, not just about the existence of product operations, but about how teams could approach it strategically within their own organizations.
Looking at the growth data for product operations, you can see a significant spike in the fall of 2023 when the book launched.
More importantly, that spike sustained itself rather than dropping back to previous levels. This suggests the book didn’t create artificial hype, but rather gave voice and structure to a trend that was already gaining momentum. The authors captured and accelerated something that was already happening across the industry.
RTO and the future of product ops
Many companies, particularly in big tech, are now mandating return-to-office (RTO) policies. Does this mean product operations will become less valuable in these environments?
I’m skeptical. Product operations will remain crucial even as teams return to offices, because we shouldn’t revert to relying primarily on water cooler conversations to run companies.
First, informal communication doesn’t scale. It depends on individual networking abilities and one-on-one relationship building across the organization.
Second, even companies mandating full return-to-office aren’t truly returning to pre-pandemic work patterns. Employees consistently report spending significant portions of their days on video calls, even when physically in the office. The reality is that most “co-located” companies still operate hybrid models.
Even at SpotHero, where I worked in-office five days a week, many colleagues worked fewer office days or were fully remote from other cities. This created ongoing operational challenges around communication, particularly with distributed team members. Nothing creates disengagement like watching people have a deep conversation while ignoring their colleagues on the dial-in.
Our work has fundamentally changed since pre-pandemic times. We won’t return to a world where everyone is co-located five days a week in the same office. Instead, we’ll continue operating in environments where people work from home regularly, whether occasionally or full-time. This means product operations can continue to help product managers navigate the challenges and opportunities of distributed work.
The question for your organization: Who is currently managing your distributed communication patterns and designing them for effectiveness? How can you ensure they’re properly supported? And if nobody is taking responsibility for this work, how can you bring in someone to own it? This is critical infrastructure for high-functioning organizations in our new work reality.