Review

Prior to this book, there wasn’t a definitive Product Operations text. Product Operations was only loosely defined in a few blog posts and job descriptions. Finally, we have a stake in the ground. Something to reference or disagree with.

This wasn’t a riveting read, nor is it a Product Management classic, but it’s a book the community needed. I’m grateful Melissa and Denise have given us a thoughtful and thorough account of Product Operations.

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Product Management in Practice

I was wrongly skeptical of this book before reading it. In hindsight, I should have read it sooner. I thought the book would attempt to cover product management end-to-end without depth. Instead, I found the book focused on where theory hits practice and things don't work as you expect. Clearly, the author's been in the trenches and experienced that cognitive dissonance between theory and practice. And for that, this book deserves a place on your product management shelf.

andrewclark.co.uk

Book Review and Summary: Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri

In Escaping the Build Trap, Melissa Perri explains how companies can stop building features nobody wants and start focusing on creating products that deliver real value. By shifting from a build-driven to a product-led mindset, teams can prioritize customer needs, measure impact, and develop a clear strategy. The book outlines how product managers play a critical role in guiding organizations through this transition, emphasizing outcomes over outputs. Learn how to restructure teams, align strategies, and leverage research to escape the build trap and ensure that every feature delivers meaningful results. Perfect for product leaders aiming to build with intent.

andrewclark.co.uk

Product Leadership

I found Product Leadership incredibly hard to read. I had no sense of place, I got lost in the long chapters and dense walls of text. I’m not surprised this book was written by three people, it doesn’t feel like a single piece of work. The nature of product leadership changes depending on the nature of the organisation (startup vs emerging vs enterprise). The authors reflected this in the structure of the book, which ultimately created duplication and made it harder to compare the differences.

andrewclark.co.uk

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• Product operations is the discipline of helping your product management function scale well. Surrounding the team with all of the essential inputs to set strategy, prioritise, and streamline ways of working.
• Product Operations has 3 core pillars:
• Business Data and Insights
• Collection and analysis of internal data for strategy creation and monitoring. Helps leadership track outcomes and determine return on investment of product teams. Contextualises business metrics with product metrics to help leaders make strategic decisions
• Customer and Market Insights
• Facilitating and aggregating external research. Streamlining insights received from users and making them accessible. Providing teams with the tools they need to conduct market research (e.g. competitor analysis, TAM-SAM-SOM)
• Process and Practices
• Defines the product operating model:
• how the company creates and deploys strategy
• how cross-functional teams collaborate around strategy and deployment
• how product management team functions
• Product governance and tool management also
• Evaluate the biggest needs and pain points. You don’t need to stand up all the pillars at once.

• Product managers often don’t have capacity to fix the process
• The absence of standard roadmapping processes, templates or a common framework for articulating roadmap outcomes hinders translation into an overall strategy
• Multi-product environments create mini fiefdoms, teams focus on their product. Sharing information and processes doesn’t happen naturally. We need Product Operations to break down silos of information and capability
• Product strategy is enabled by core inputs (quantitative and qualitative data) that inform your focus (or ‘bets’). Setting strategy without these core inputs, you’re making uninformed, and likely, quite costly bets.
• Product operations also helps bring the organisation together to reach goals. Product operations is an enablement function, here to make the decision-making process easier and more transparent (not to make decisions).

• Business and data insights:
• Steps to implementing data & insight capability:
• Understand what questions you need to answer to inform your product strategy
• Determine which pieces of data you need to track to answer those questions
• Identify which systems the data lives in and how to extract it manually
• Create a baseline dashboard (by pulling data manually)
• Automate the dashboard creation in a BI tool (Business Intelligence)
• Revenue and cost analysis is a core part of the product operations process. You should be able to provide a product-centric view of bottom-line costs through monitoring:
• Cost of efforts
• Investment spend breakdown
• View of activities aligned to goals/initiatives
• Efficiency of operations
• Support calls/defects
• An experienced product manager can tell a story about their product strategy with with data
• Different data is required for the different levels of strategy creation ( for forming strategic intents, identifying product initiatives, or generating options)
• Teams need to slice product metrics in different ways, to understand the trends across varying customer types, cohorts or geographies.
• Product operations can ensure that the team has the right instrumentation and data available at their fingertips to make these decisions.
• When teams have real-time data, they’ll be able to react quickly to customer feedback and market demands
• The type of engineering work needs to be tracked because it’s accounted for in different ways:
• Capitalise new features, and foundational technology
• Expense bug fixing, performance enhancements, experimental development and research

• Customer and Market Insights
• Research initiatives are worthless if the product team can’t use the outputs.
• Democratise your research → increase your learning velocity
• Friction to book interviews can stop product managers talking to customers.
• Setup systems that allow PdMs to get the insights they need to make critical strategy decisions
• Insights can come from many different places: Win/loss analysis data from sales, reviews from customers on websites, support calls and emails, generative and evaluative user research conducted by other teams, reviewing existing customer research
• Product operations for customer insights is about streamlining 3 things:
1. Get internal data you have already to product teams
2. Making it easier to do generative and evaluative research
3. Making the research accessible and reusable for all teams
• Enabling a customer research function:
1. Catalog: what sources exist today
2. Contextualise: What was the intent from each channel?
3. Create: 360 degree view of data to date
• Inspect the quality of the data/assets you have. Can they be made more useful for product managers? Work with departments to use better tagging (e.g win/loss reason codes by Sales)
• Focus on the activities, tools, and systems that will make user research accessible to the rest of the organisation:
• Democratisation of Research
• Access users quickly (setup a user access system to stop research from being a bottleneck)
• Train those interested in conducting research (e.g. unmoderated usability testing)
• Allow more people to self-serve
• Research Repositories
• Catalog, store and expose previously conducted research. Anyone requesting research must first check the repository
• UX research framework and playbooks. Helps teams understand questions each research team can answer and align to the product and marketing life cycle

• Processes and Practices (Product Operating Model)
• Product Ops isn’t about creating process, it’s about increasing the quality and speed of decision making
• A Product Operating Model: the way we translate the business and product strategies into the work getting done. Components of…