While the product ops exist to support their product manager counterparts, Product Managers, on the other hand, are often responsible for all the things that fall under the product umbrella. Sometimes, it gets tricky to differentiate between these two positions and separate their responsibilities. Several experts have shared their views on the successful relationship between product ops and product managers. They believe that PMs focus on things like stakeholder communication, the voice of customers, enablement, and sales trends. But now, they need to spend their time somewhere else.
Product managers should spend most of their – if not all – understanding customer pain points and communicate with the engineering team so that everything goes well on the product side. If a Product Manager is genuinely focused on these two areas, there is little room for internal communication and alignment, release management, and documentation.
So, product ops keep a pulse on all secondary yet highly important things while PMs should spend quality time with engineers and customers. Though there’s no one-size-fits-all model for product ops, organizations should dedicate resources to make it a team’s full-time job.
Many headhunting firms in NYC believe that product managers and product ops differ in the three key areas. These include:
1. Resolving Internal Vs. External Pain Points
Pain points that need to be resolved to differentiate product managers from product ops. PMs have to solve external customer pain through product outcomes such as what new features, functionality, or products they need to build to fulfill user needs and demands.
On the other hand, Product ops teams have to solve pain points related to product delivery for their stakeholders across the company. This means they need to manage all aspects of general and beta releases, write and maintain documentation for each release, and train their staff in customer success, sales, and marketing on the product’s latest functionality.
2. Collaborating For Different Purposes
The roles of product manager and product ops are collaborative. PM partners with customers and engineers to ideate, experiment, and move quickly to bring ideas to life. Product ops support the internal partners to build trust and empower teams across the company with timely resources and information. The association between PMs and product ops goes hand-in-hand. PM makes allies to provide the best user experience; the product ops make sure that the rest of the organization knows everything about PM’s efforts.
3. Varying Definitions of Value
There is a difference between these two functions when it comes to delivering value, which lies in intangibility. Product Managers build tangible products. They feature the goal of providing value to their customer base. On the other hand, product ops take those features and build intangible value around what the PMs have created. This includes training resources, feedback collection and management, launch communications, and more.
If you are planning to hire product ops, you must create a list of product management interview questions. Also, you must prioritize skills like empathy, flexibility, customer-centric, strong communication, trustworthy and others. You can also take the help of a product management recruitment agency to avoid hiring hassles.
