Episode 50: Answering Questions About Adding in Prod Ops, When to Move On, and What A CPO Should Know
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about building product operations teams, staying in a position you love vs. diversifying your experiences, and how much a CPO actually needs to know about the inner workings of their product.
Have a product question for Melissa? Submit one here and Melissa may answer it in a future episode.
Subscribe via your favorite platform:
Q: How can an organization make the pivot from being reactionary in their product initiatives to being driven by market research and data? What kind of talent should a product leader be on the lookout for when building this type of team from the ground up? [2:04]
A: When you're making the pivot from being reactionary to getting more forward, this team that we're talking about is key. For product leaders, having a team to do this really helps. A lot of smaller companies have their product manager do this along with their current role, because the scope is smaller, so it’s easy to do this combined work when it’s early days. But as you start to scale you want to make sure that you have somebody who's at least surfacing up insights… When you're building a product operations team and you're thinking about the design you want to think about two different things: external research and internal research. [2:32]
Q: How should I balance my love for my current company and role with the pressure to explore new opportunities? [8:39]
A: This is a very personal choice, but it's all up to your goals. I know some people who stayed in companies [for years] because they loved it and what it stood for… they learned as that company went through various different stages of its life cycle. That's one thing that you could do; you're always going to learn if your company is rapidly growing and expanding. What are your career goals? Is it to be a top product executive excelling at your craft? If so, maybe you would want to move somewhere else and learn things that you didn't even know that you didn't know. [9:19]
Q: As a CPO, do I invest the same amount of time in understanding everything about the product, particularly with a complex and feature-rich B2B product? Or should I focus on creating the necessary conditions to transform the product culture of the company? How advanced does my product knowledge need to be? [14:36]
A: Here’s where CPOs go wrong: they get too into the weeds of their product and the nitty gritty… You should know generally what it does but you're never going to be an expert on each individual little piece. You need to know enough to be dangerous about setting strategy and understanding where there's gaps and opportunities, so you should first leverage your team to give you insights into what needs your full attention… Secondly, you want to take some of that information and figure out where the biggest gaps are. [15:06]
Resources