Guest post from Baris Ermut, Product Manager at Innetial and Product Ops HQ Community member, who’s an expert in all things product.
As the role of Product Operations continues to evolve in organizations, it is becoming increasingly important to track and measure the effectiveness of the function. In this post, we will explore how to measure the success of your Product Operations team.
What is Product Operations?
Before we dive into measuring success, let’s first simply define what Product Operations is. Product Operations is a function within an organization that helps the Product team run efficiently and effectively. The Product Operations team is responsible for making product development practices smoother, enabling cross-functional collaboration, and ensuring the successful delivery of products to the market.
Learn more about the role of product operations
The Importance of Measuring Success
Measuring the success of your Product Operations function is essential to know whether you or your team is meeting its goals and objectives. It helps you identify areas for improvement, demonstrate the value your function brings to the organization, and make data-driven decisions. Here are five ways to measure the success of your Product Operations function:
- Surveys
Surveys are a great way to understand how well your team is communicating with cross-functional teams. You can create surveys similar to the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to understand how well the communication practices work. Surveys can help you understand what cross-functional teams think about the practices you have implemented.
- Product Team Health and Effectiveness
Product team health and effectiveness are key metrics to track. You can analyze whether the product team is focusing on real problems instead of tasks that can be automated. Tracking this metric helps you identify whether your team is spending time on high-value tasks that drive the organization’s success.
- Task/Project Success
Product Operations is about making product development practices more efficient, so every task you have is like a new product to track success. Tracking the success of every task separately will help you identify the areas where you can improve. It also helps you understand whether your team is delivering products on time and within budget.
- Adoption Metrics
Tracking adoption metrics can help you measure success. You can determine whether new changes and practices are being used, and whether they are working as intended. Adoption metrics also help you understand how well your team is adopting new technologies and tools.
- User Feedback
User feedback is critical for understanding what’s working and what’s not. For Product Operations, your user base is the product team and cross-functional teams. Once a change happens, you can always ask for feedback. User feedback helps you identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions.
Measuring the success of your Product Operations function can be tricky. Keep in mind that there is no right or wrong way to do it. You can create your own method of measuring success, whether it’s qualitative or quantitative. Choose whichever method works best for you and your product team.
3 Possible KPIs That Will Influence Every Product Operations Leader
- Time to Market
If you want to improve your revenue and customer satisfaction, it’s important to measure how long it takes to develop and launch a new product or feature. By tracking time to market, you can identify the bottlenecks in your development process and streamline it to deliver products faster.
- Customer Satisfaction
Happy customers are the key to a successful product. As a Product Operations leader, you’re responsible for ensuring the development process is effective, and the end product meets customers’ needs. By tracking customer satisfaction, you can find out which areas need improvement and make necessary changes to the development process, leading to happier customers.
- Productivity
Efficiency is important when it comes to product development. By measuring productivity, you can identify where your team is struggling and offer the support and resources they need to work more efficiently. By comparing productivity metrics to industry benchmarks, you can ensure that your team is competitive and working at their maximum potential.
Tracking these KPIs will provide you with a comprehensive picture of how your Product Operations function is performing, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to increase efficiency and drive success.
Wrap Up
Measuring the success of your Product Operations function is crucial to know how well you and/or your product operations team is performing. It helps you identify areas for improvement, demonstrate the value your function brings to the organization, and make data-driven decisions.
By using both qualitative and quantitative methods like surveys, tracking product team health and effectiveness, task/project success, adoption metrics, and user feedback, you can demonstrate the value of your Product Operations team and help your organization achieve its goals.
So, how do you manage to measure the success of your Product Operations function?
Hope you’ve enjoyed it and might learn something new or insightful! I’m totally open to all kinds of comments and coffee talk about Product Operations.
