2025 in Review and the Future of Product Ops in 2026

The Product Operations function continues to mature, with practitioners facing new challenges around strategic alignment, planning discipline, and cross-functional collaboration. This community-led roundtable brings together Product Ops professionals to reflect on what worked in 2025 and identify which practices deserve continued investment in 2026.

Clare Hawthorne, VP of Product Operations & Head of Technology Product Management at Datavant, guides an open discussion with practitioners from the Product Ops HQ community. Rather than presenting predictions, this session captures real experiences from teams navigating outcomes-based operating models, AI adoption challenges, and the shift toward more strategic roles.

The conversation explores four key patterns that emerged in 2025:

• Rigor replaced rituals – as teams got leaner, operational debt became visible, and Product Ops became the stabilizing force
• Planning became a crucible – prioritization, tradeoffs, and cross-team coherence challenges surfaced, shifting us from facilitating conversations to orchestrating alignment
• Foundations became blockers – whether tackling AI, quarterly planning, or basic visibility, teams hit the same constraint: fragmented tooling and inconsistent data
• Global collaboration reshaped operating models – distributed teams needed orchestration through shared definitions, async discipline, and clearer alignment systems — and Product Ops played a central role in enabling that shift.

If you want to hear how others handled planning, alignment, team needs, and shifting demands across the year, this session offers a helpful look into how the community approached it. Watch now!

Key Takeaways

• Outcomes became the operating model: The drumbeat of measuring outcomes resonated across the community, with Product Ops professionals championing this shift throughout the year. Teams moved toward scorecards that balance company-wide metrics with measures directly influenced by product teams.
• Planning discipline requires both top-down and bottom-up integration: Effective planning connects strategic initiatives to execution. Product Ops teams partnered closely with engineering operations to create this integration without forcing product managers to update multiple systems.
• Experimentation drives value creation, not just productivity: Gen AI tools enable more experiments, which generate options that have strategic value. Product Ops professionals found success by encouraging small experiments in workflows, from automating reports to transforming voice of customer feedback into actionable themes.
• Product Ops is earning a seat at the strategic table: The remit shifted upward toward strategy and cross-functional systems. Product Ops professionals are now addressing questions about strategic alignment, cross-functional collaboration, and business-wide orchestration rather than just engineering operations.
• Clear value propositions prevent the “junk drawer” problem: When Product Ops teams articulate specific problem areas they solve—such as governance and planning, product insights and data, or workflow optimization—stakeholders engage them as strategic partners rather than catch-all resources for anything without a clear home.

Product Ops HQ is brought to you by Dragonboat, the AI-powered strategic product portfolio management platform that helps teams align strategy and execution at scale.