Product Operations:
The Role Fixing Product Teams

Christine Itwaru

Head of Product Operations, Pendo

FEATURED

The Role

What is Product Ops?

"Product operations is the creation of some system that allows you to thrive or allows your team to thrive in product management."

The system: processes, data, tools, customer voice aligned for PM success
The role: strategic advisor to CPO on qualitative and quantitative insights
The origin: natural evolution as product teams grow (like marketing ops)
The timing: summer 2019, the "birth" of product ops as a recognized function

What They Actually Do

Five Core Functions of Product Ops

Voice of Customer: Aggregating feedback from sales, support, prospects, and paying customers. Bringing qualitative + quantitative data together for PM decision-making
Tooling & Data: Ensuring product tech stack (Salesforce, Looker, Pendo, etc.) is set up for maximum outcomes. Connecting systems for better insights
Content & Education: Building content strategy into product process to maximize outcomes, retention, growth, adoption through in-app guidance

Process & Facilitation: Managing the product development lifecycle, agile ceremonies, cross-team coordination when starting product ops (usually temporary)
Stakeholder Alignment: Creating transparency across revenue team (sales, success) and product team so everyone knows what's coming and how to act on it

The Customer Transparency ModelChristine's breakthrough at Pendo: bring sales, success, and support into the same room with data so everyone sees the same customer feedback. This prevents teams from screaming for different things.

Why It Emerged

The Perfect Storm (Summer 2019)

Growth: Rapid scaling across startups created chaos in planning, alignment, and customer synthesis
Product-Led Growth: Companies shifting to PLG models needed product teams to do more with less manual process
Organizational Maturity: Same pattern happened with marketing ops and sales ops, natural evolution
PM Overload: PMs drowning in transparency, stakeholder management, voice of customer, planning, needed a force multiplier

The Real Problem

CPOs now responsible for business metrics, not just product delivery. PMs needed structural support to focus on customer understanding and engineering partnership, their highest-value work.

Christine's Origin Story

Former PM who felt customer pain acutely (watching an internal customer fight a keyboard). That empathy drove her into the role, to build systems so other PMs don't waste time on the wrong things.

The Playbook

How to Hire Your First Ops Person

Distinguish ops from agile/program managers: ops person knows the product, customer, and business
Common wedge: start with planning process, then evolve to strategic advisory
Hire for comfort with change, this role automates itself out of tasks
Goal: stand up system, get out of the way, move to more strategic work

The Transparency LaunchA bad product launch in Christine's fifth week at Pendo revealed the core problem: no org-wide readiness. Not just "Is it coming?" but "What do we do with it?" Transparency without capability is useless.

Contrarian

Product Ops Myths Debunked

✗Ops is just a Band-Aid for inefficiencyINSTEAD →✓ Ops is a sign of org maturity & growth. Alignment keeps companies moving at scale.

✗Ops teams will stick around foreverINSTEAD →✓ Good ops person automates their own role out. Build system, then move to strategy.

✗PMs should never give up customer timeINSTEAD →✓ PMs need ops partner so they can do customer work. Don't hire ops to take that away.

✗Ops role is permanent once createdINSTEAD →✓ Tasks evolve. Automation, tools, and strategy replace process. Team needs to be comfortable with change.

Based on Christine Itwaru's episode on Lenny's Podcast. All ideas on this page are from the episode.Watch on YouTube Follow @christineitwaru on X

GO DEEPER IN THE EPISODE

02:34 How working with Ben Williams led Christine to Lenny’s Podcast 05:02 The role of product ops in product management 07:31 How 2019 became “the summer of product ops”11:19 The different ways product ops can assist product teams 15:50 How Pendo used product ops to bring teams together and share data 18:15 Where user research fits in 22:39 How product ops are being utilized, and not exclusively in B2B companies 24:47 How to convince a product leader that you need product ops 27:41 Why customer experience is the core of a PM’s role 29:47 Who is doing the work of the product ops person before that role is created 31:37 Christine’s response to Casey Winters’s take on ops teams 37:40 Signs your company could benefit from a product ops team 30:56 How a lack of transparency led to Pendo adding product ops 46:11 The line between product ops and product marketing 47:30 Who might be a good fit for a product ops role 53:39 Red flags for product ops roles (that apply to any role)54:08 How product teams are structured at Pendo 57:18 Lightning round

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