Why ProductOps is integral to the future of product development

If you told your engineering team that they were required to work from the office every day, you might start receiving resignation letters.

“In product development, remote working has become the norm due to the pandemic,” says Steve Ng, principal developer relations lead for Asia Pacific and Japan at observability company New Relic.

This shift is the latest in the ongoing evolution of how – and where – software is developed. Many developers prefer working remotely, as it frees them from the distractions of an office setting and allows them to be more productive.

But this autonomy can also bring a lack of consistency and standardization in work processes, poor team communication, as well as burnout due to engineers working longer hours. Additionally, remote work can blur the lines between job functions and responsibilities.

Fortunately, there is a solution: Product Operations, also known as ProductOps.

What is ProductOps?

Much like its better-known cousin DevOps, ProductOps is about creating organizational change. The pandemic catalyzed the growth of the role, which has helped teams manage product development in a much more effective way.

“It’s not a tool, it’s not something you can buy,” Ng explains. “It’s about cultural and organizational roles and responsibilities that are usually cross-functional.”

Steve Ng, principal developer relations lead for Asia Pacific and Japan at New Relic / Photo credit: New Relic

Specifically, ProductOps roles focus on facilitating communication and stakeholder buy-in as well as streamlining work processes, including the sharing of resources and data between teams and departments. It affords product leaders the time and space to focus on strategic and innovative work that can add more value to the business.

Having someone to coordinate at the big picture level also helps to clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each individual, solving another issue of remote working.

“A lot of product managers are experiencing burnout because, in a perfect world, they’d handle product development, product marketing, go-to-market strategy, bug fixing, and everything else,” Ng says. “But there’s only so much one person [or department] can do.”

Another benefit of having someone in charge of ProductOps is being able to define terms – like milestones, features, and bugs – that can vary wildly between different teams. This helps, Ng says, because every product manager has their own tools and processes that they use to address these areas of focus.

He also points out that ProductOps is especially valuable to firms with several product offerings, as the role ensures that consistency is maintained across the entire ecosystem.

By that token, establishing the ProductOps function is also important for companies that are looking to grow and expand their product offerings.

The industry experience

For the technology industry, the Great Resignation and the subsequent Great Reevaluation have demonstrated why the employee experience is essential to business success.

“For those companies without consistent tools, processes, and communication delivery channels, the pandemic has created missed deadlines and the inability to deliver on projects,” Ng says. “In order to drive greater productivity and engagement, companies have looked to ProductOps and created roles to drive employee satisfaction and productivity.”

At New Relic, the team has introduced ProductOps initiatives to support its own growth ambitions and make sure its large global development teams can work simultaneously on tasks from different locations.

“From my own personal experience and role, having our own ProductOps team makes us more focused and efficient,” Ng says. “With so many team members scattered around the world, it helps to make sure that we’re in sync.”

Because of the cross-functional nature of ProductOps positions, New Relic is focused on cultivating ProductOps talent internally. This allows ProductOps team members to build relationships and communication lines quickly and manage the vital relationships needed to implement their initiatives much more swiftly.

Photo credit: gmast3r / 123RF

“It could be a product manager or someone that’s familiar with different business units – we move them into ProductOps because they can communicate to different teams very effectively,” Ng shares.

But what does an ideal ProductOps team member look like? They must have strong attention to detail and be data-driven, as they will need to collect and analyze information from a variety of business units. Their goal: consolidating and translating the data to ensure that everyone understands where they – and their team – stand. Being business-savvy is also important, as it allows these team members to easily communicate with upper management about what’s going on in the trenches.

“Sometimes, they also have to teach people how to use certain programs or tools or provide insight on the standardized definitions of certain terms,” Ng adds. “This creates consistency and ensures that everyone is using the same tools and has the same understanding of project parameters.”

The growing importance of ProductOps

Looking ahead, Ng believes that user experiences will continue to become simpler and that the abstraction of technology will increase. Low and no-code software development tools and platforms will also gain popularity.

Simplified user experiences are a good thing, of course. But as technology becomes more abstracted and simplified, engineers will need to put more time and effort into creating something that’s both easy to use and robust. As much more of their time will be focused on their tech stack, developers may not have enough bandwidth to look at other areas, which is where ProductOps can come in.

“I think the importance [of ProductOps] is going to grow because more specialization in product engineering is going to occur, and ProductOps will play a key supporting role in that framework.”

As a leader in observability, New Relic empowers engineers with data to plan, build, deploy, and run great software. New Relic delivers the only unified data platform for all telemetry paired with powerful full-stack analysis tools to help engineers do their best work with data, not opinions.

Find out more on its website.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.