Melissa Perri + Denise Tilles

Automating the data collection for recurring high-stakes presentations like board meetings prevents 'data obsolescence' and saves leadership time.

"I love product ops because when we prepare for board meetings, I know there's a certain set of information that I'm going to have to put together for this board meeting, and then when we go do it manu..."

Product managers must retain ownership of difficult stakeholder negotiations and trade-off decisions to remain accountable for outcomes.

"They're not going to handle hard stakeholder conversations about trade-offs for you, all of those things that you are going to want to keep ownership of because at the end of the day as a product mana..."

This question assesses a candidate's learning mindset, self-awareness, and ability to evolve based on new information.

"When was the last time you changed your mind about something really important and why?"

The goal of the failure question is to see if the candidate can objectively analyze a mistake and extract a lesson without over-spinning it into a positive.

"Tell me about a time that you failed and what happened."

The guests emphasize the ability to identify recurring manual pains and build automated systems or frameworks to solve them as a core competency.

"Tell me about some process or something that you had to do in your job that you really hated and that you ended up just trying to automate a way or build a system around it to make it better."

Standardizing the go-to-market (GTM) process ensures consistency and efficiency across multiple product launches.

"Product ops will take on a lot of the coordination of those types of things... making sure that go-to-market process is consistent across the organization so that it's not like... everybody's reinvent..."

Strategic vision is informed by granular data cuts that reveal how specific segments interact with specific product lines.

"As a chief product officer, ARR is interesting to me, but it's not as interesting to me as ARR by customer segment. It's not as interesting as ARR by product line. It's not as interesting if I take th..."

Executive leadership requires a high-level portfolio view of the roadmap to ensure R&D allocation aligns with company strategy.

"He was looking for a portfolio roadmap of what everybody's doing and he wanted to see what are the big pushes we're making from a feature perspective and how do they tie back to our overall strategy a..."

Effective goal setting requires automated tracking and visibility to ensure teams are progressing toward their objectives.

"We also had to build a way to track the OKRs that were deployed and actually see where it was. So we had to build the dashboards for that."

Building a pre-vetted database of research participants streamlines the discovery process for product managers.

"It's also about finding participants who want to opt into research. So making sure that you have customers aware that, 'Hey, we might contact you to do customer interviews. This is why. Do you want to..."

Centralizing research findings into a queryable database prevents redundant discovery work across the organization.

"It's also about aggregating all the interviews or customer research that's been done so people can query it and start to see what do we already know so we're not going out there and duplicating a bunc..."

Valuable product insights are often trapped in silos like Salesforce or support tickets and need to be synthesized for the product team.

"Another piece of this too that we talk about is getting qualitative insights from sales and support... what we're trying to do is get that out of these individual systems and into somewhere where a lo..."

The entire transcript focuses on this emerging role as a distinct discipline that builds 'products for the product team' to enable better decision-making and scaling.

"Product operations does not take away decision making rights from the product manager. It's there to inform them."