Could One Team Hold the Key to Unlocking Your Entire Organization’s Potential?
How Wells Fargo unleashed product excellence
Dissatisfied by the inefficiencies of the old project-based model, countless organizations have started transforming to new approaches.
They've restructured teams, assigned people product roles, and embraced Agile methodologies.
Yet, many still struggle to deliver real value to their customers.
Why?
By remaining largely siloed, companies are unable to collaborate cross-functionally and have little appreciation for how crucial the product role is in leading software delivery.
What’s a product manager?
Few companies understand what their product people do or what they need to do their jobs properly.
Instead, companies emphasize managing projects, and have long charged a dedicated group to enforce strict processes: the Project Management Organization, or “PMO.” But while this group expects compliance, they frequently can’t deliver what product managers really need to be effective.
Let’s take the example of product analytics data.
The product metrics mess
Product managers rely on easy data access to support quality decision-making.
Organizations may have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in data and analytics platforms that generate tons of data. But product managers need help to get the right insights. In a PMO-driven world, no one is held accountable for getting those insights the “last mile” from the data system to the product managers who need them most.
An independent product manager simply wouldn’t have the bandwidth to fix this problem. This is a clear sign the ecosystem that’s supposed to help inform product decisions is dysfunctional.
Imagine how much more effective product managers could be when given timely and easy access to the right data and insights.
Product data is only one aspect of many
Leveraging data and insights represents just a small part of a product managers’ responsibilities.
The issue becomes far more complex when you consider other aspects crucial to product discovery and delivery, especially research, go-to-market, finance, sales, advertising, and marketing.
The larger the organization, the more these issues compound, blocking your product managers’ ability to lead their teams to do what they were put in place to do. Yet no one’s accountable for fixing these fundamental ecosystem challenges.
One effective way to overcome this, as well as other forms of organizational red tape and inefficiencies, is to establish a Product Operations or “Product Ops” team.
Meet Product Ops
You might have heard of Product Ops but may not be aware of what it is or how it works.
Without it, otherwise capable product managers can find themselves lost, stuck in organizational bureaucracy, or “reinventing the wheel,” unable to unleash their cross-functional teams' full potential.
In my years of working with both startups and large enterprises, I've seen firsthand how similar product gaps can accumulate, impeding an organization's ability to innovate and compete.
This is where a dedicated Product Ops team can address these organizational challenges, freeing product teams to focus on creating and sustaining great products.
A formula for success
In this collaborative article with Ahmed Mohammed (formerly with Wells Fargo's Enterprise Content Management group, later Product Operations Leader at Bloomberg Industry Group), we'll explore why Product Operations can be crucial for any organization that wants to get serious about innovation and customer value delivery.
We'll share real-world examples, debunk some common misconceptions, and provide actionable insights on where and how to start building this crucial competency for your organization.
If you're ready to take your software value delivery from good to great, get ready, people.
Product Ops could be the game-changer you’ve been looking for.
Let’s begin by looking at how Ahmed built Product Ops within Wells Fargo’s Enterprise Content Management division.
Project to Product at Wells Fargo
A few years back, Ahmed led Wells Fargo through a large-scale Agile Transformation, reorganizing 600 team members into product teams.
Managers were reassigned to product roles and had to shift their development focus from on-time, on-budget Waterfall project delivery, to continuous, iterative, and incremental value delivery overnight.
Negotiating for speed
Software teams in highly regulated industries like banking must work within strict Governance, Risk, and Compliance (“GRC”) regulations for everything they build.
Ahmed started working with delivery managers to identify areas where risk wasn’t as high and how teams could start being nimbler and moving faster.
It took skillful negotiation with multiple internal GRC groups to identify what evidence teams needed to demonstrate that they had done the necessary testing before pushing their code to production.
Minimum Viable Compliance
In the beginning, Ahmed focused on ensuring developers had reviewed their code and that it was delivering the necessary value.
With the shift from one-time, “big-bang” project validation to continuous product value check-ins, Ahmed encouraged engineers to run more frequent and smaller code reviews throughout development. Not only was their development work solving client problems with fewer lines of code, but it also accelerated higher-quality software value delivery.
By demonstrating initial success with reduced oversight in smaller ways, Ahmed and his Product Ops team built trust and smoothed a great deal of red tape. He used these initial successes to broker high-level, appropriate guidance agreements with other internal oversight groups.
Ahmed’s Product Ops group eventually took over a large share of the GRC overhead from product managers and their teams.
Guiding principles
Ahmed gradually established Product Ops as the first line of defense for all product manager issues, regardless of team.
From the beginning, he encouraged people to think in terms of broader and more holistic solutions that would facilitate customer value delivery.
Ahmed’s Product Ops met regularly with Wells Fargo’s other “group champions” and solicited the most effective templates, principles, and approaches for enabling teams to deliver better products.
Wells Fargo’s Product Ops
Despite some initial successes, Ahmed's Product Ops team had to negotiate with and win over many people across all levels of Wells Fargo’s Enterprise Content Management division as they shifted to the new ways of working.
Ahmed highlighted examples and shared learnings from Product Operations successes, making sure teams and their stakeholders had the flexibility to negotiate how best to apply them based on each team’s needs. The new templates, processes, and working methods allowed product managers to collaborate more transparently on larger initiatives.
Ahmed’s Product Operations group remained on the lookout for opportunities to root out and find problems that were blocking product managers and their teams. As Product Ops allowed teams to simplify and streamline processes, it started to make a difference, an approach Ahmed later took to Bloomberg Industry Group.
Through these experiences, Ahmed learned some important principles for addressing people’s misunderstandings about Product Ops.
Common Product Ops misconceptions
Product Ops has gained attention and popularity to the point that even leading product thought leader and “Transformed” book author Marty Cagan has acknowledged the potential of a Product Operations group to increase the effectiveness of product managers and teams.
While it may look different in every organization and may not even be called “Product Ops,” it’s important to highlight what it isn’t:
Product Ops isn’t a return to the Project Management Office (PMO) – Product Ops diverges from the PMO in several critical ways. Instead of being a compliance oversight body, Product Ops is an enabler and value facilitator for the organization. While both the PMO and Product Ops can contribute to collecting and sharing best practices, the PMO typically uses a “Command and Control” style, while Product Ops seeks to empower through “servant leadership.”
Product Ops doesn’t remove Product Manager autonomy. Far from diminishing the product role, Product Ops actually unleashes PMs by smoothing operational overhead. This frees up product teams to do what they’re best at—product discovery and delivery—while developing great relationships with end-user customers and stakeholders.
Product Ops doesn’t manage projects – While some companies may maintain project managers, Product Ops has a broader scope. Project management focuses on the efficient execution and delivery of specific initiatives, while Product Operations is a strategic function that optimizes the environment for product managers to lead value delivery.
Product Ops isn’t a specific skill set – It requires diverse capabilities across process optimization, data analytics, user research, cross-functional collaboration, and tooling management. By taking a bird's-eye view of the end-to-end flow from product discovery and delivery to launch and monitoring, Product Ops remains focused on continually improving that flow.
Effectiveness booster
Ironically, by indexing team effectiveness over efficiency, Product Ops’ focus on strategic, product-led value delivery is far more efficient in the long run than the ponderous overhead of the traditional project-based model.
While Product Operations can’t turn underperforming product managers into great ones overnight, they can set hard-working, struggling ones up for greater success.
And the positive benefits for the organization can be considerable.
The benefits of effective Product Ops
When done right, Product Ops can be a force-multiplying function.
By constantly tracking down and solving product team roadblocks and organizational ecosystem dysfunctions, Product Ops is always looking for ways to unlock product-led innovation.
These can range from small, lightweight, “low-hanging fruit” efforts that can be rapidly resolved to bigger blockers that require diplomatic skill and strategic prioritization yet can significantly improve client-centric value delivery.
Getting product teams closer to their users
Consider product managers looking to increase the frequency and quality of their customer research activities.
Instead of having every team across the organization seek to solve this problem in their own way, they would now have a central body to work with. Product Ops can crowdsource and establish the appropriate underlying principles, user recruitment methods, and tooling and centralize knowledge sharing, training, and coaching.
This is another example of how Product Ops removes friction for product managers to collect and organize the necessary qualitative insights. In this way, Product Operations frees product teams to develop deeper relationships with end users. Product managers can then share the valuable customer insights they uncover with stakeholders to inform strategy.
One important thing to remember is that while Product Ops can facilitate easier research and discovery efforts, they should never come between software teams and their end users.
Other Product Ops benefits
We’ve touched on just two areas where Product Ops can provide value, but depending on your organization’s needs, the function can show significant benefits across numerous other places:
Facilitating cross-functional coordination with other groups
Establishing product tooling, including user insight capture and sharing, road mapping, and strategy & goal-setting tools
Simplifying go-to-market product launches, including working with internal & external governance and compliance bodies
Building and sustaining a Product Community of Practice
Continuously improving and optimizing processes
Centralizing and sharing knowledge
Formalizing and managing Product Team Training & Onboarding
And more…
With all these potentially positive areas of impact, it’s important to note that product operations can’t immediately solve every organizational inefficiency.
The Product Ops roadmap
Working with internal stakeholders and product leaders, Product Ops must create their own roadmap, negotiating a clear set of expectations and success metrics on where they’ll focus initially and what they’ll tackle next.
Depending on what is important for your organization, you may have them focus solely on a few things instead of going broad. Ideally, you would pick a starting point based on the biggest problem to solve– perhaps user research– and then broaden to building a stronger product value delivery ecosystem.
Product Ops encourages continuous learning and improvement across every area when done well. Regular retrospectives, capturing learnings, and making small fixes and updates combine to create compounding positive effects over time.
Product launches may be handled in a certain way when you initially establish your Product Ops team, but they can become smoother and less painful with each release.
Summary & takeaways
We have seen many organizations make the critical shift from project-centric to more product- and customer-centric approaches.
This shift comes from the realization that building features on time and budget without actually solving real customer problems is pointless.
When projects and a feature factory focus dominate, it can be impossible for product managers to lead their teams in effective customer value delivery.
By reducing friction and increasing product team effectiveness and flow, Product Ops can facilitate the shift to a strategic focus and the delivery of solutions that meet customer needs while also delivering business value.