Product Ops Is an Amplifier, Not a Cure
The function everyone's hiring for might be amplifying the very problems it was meant to solve. And the uncomfortable truth is that no amount of process documentation will fix a fundamentally broken o
I watched a Product Ops team get dismantled last year. Not for lack of effort. They’d built dashboards, standardised sprint ceremonies, created feedback loops with customer success. By every textbook measure, they’d done their job.
The execution gap hadn’t budged.
If anything, teams were more frustrated than before. More meetings. More templates to fill. More “alignment sessions” that aligned precisely nothing. The Head of Product Ops left quietly, probably wondering what went wrong.
Here’s what went wrong: they’d installed a turbocharger on a car with no wheels.
The Amplification Problem
Product Ops has become the organisational equivalent of a superfood. Everyone wants it. Most people aren’t entirely sure what it does. And the marketing around it promises transformation without acknowledging that some bodies reject even the healthiest interventions.
The pitch goes something like this: Product Ops creates the connective tissue between teams. It handles the operational burden so PMs can focus on strategy. It standardises processes and ensures data flows to the right places.
“Product Operations is what a trainer and nutritionist are to an elite athlete.”
Lovely metaphor. But what happens when your athlete has a torn ACL and refuses to acknowledge it?
Here’s what nobody tells you in the thought leadership pieces: Product Ops is an amplifier, not a transformer. It makes your existing organisational dynamics louder and more visible. If your company has healthy cross-functional relationships, clear decision rights, and genuine strategic alignment, Prod Ops will accelerate that. You’ll ship faster, learn quicker, waste less.
But if your organisation is dysfunctional? If leadership says one thing and measures another? If teams are fighting over territory and nobody trusts the data anyway?
Prod Ops becomes a megaphone for chaos.
The Dysfunction Multiplier
I’ve seen this pattern play out across at least four companies now. It looks different each time, but the underlying mechanics are identical.
A company decides they have an execution problem. (They’re right, they do.) Someone reads that 96% of billion-dollar companies have Product Ops. Leadership concludes that Product Ops must be the missing ingredient. They hire a Head of Product Ops, give them a vague mandate to “improve how we work,” and wait for the transformation.
What happens next is predictable.
The new Prod Ops lead starts asking questions. They want to understand the current state: How do decisions get made? Where does customer feedback go? Who owns the roadmap? What does the data say?
And they discover something uncomfortable. The reason execution is broken isn’t a lack of process. It’s that the processes they do have are actively working against each other. Marketing has one definition of success, Product has another, and Engineering measures something else entirely. Leadership wants innovation and predictability simultaneously. Nobody trusts the metrics because the metrics have been gamed for years.
Into this mess walks a well-intentioned Prod Ops team armed with Notion templates and a mandate to create consistency.
They document the current processes. (Which makes visible how contradictory they are.) They build dashboards. (Which surface data nobody wants to see.) They try to standardise sprint ceremonies. (Which reveals that different teams have fundamentally different understandings of what a sprint even means.)
Every intervention, however sensible, exposes another fault line.
“Product Operations serves as the custodian of the product data ecosystem. Their responsibility is to ensure the integrity of product data and transform raw usage statistics into structured, actionable information.”
Sure. But what if nobody wants actionable information? What if actionable information would require people to change their behaviour, admit past mistakes, or give up pet projects?
The Prod Ops team becomes the bearer of unwelcome truths. And organisations have a well-documented response to messengers bearing unwelcome truths.
What Actually Has to Be True
So is Product Ops just doomed? Should companies skip it entirely?
No. But they need to be honest about what has to be true before Prod Ops can actually help.
First: You need genuine executive commitment to transparency. Not the “we value transparency” that appears on the values poster. Actual willingness to surface uncomfortable data and act on it. If your leadership team doesn’t want to know the real cycle time, the real adoption rates, the real reasons features fail, then Prod Ops will either become a producer of sanitised reports or a political liability.
I worked with a fintech where the CEO genuinely wanted to understand why their time-to-market had doubled. She didn’t love what the Prod Ops analysis revealed (too many approval layers she’d personally instituted), but she acted on it. That’s rare.
Second: Decision rights have to be clear before you can standardise anything. Prod Ops can document and streamline a process. It cannot adjudicate a turf war. If Product and Engineering fundamentally disagree about who owns technical roadmap decisions, no amount of process documentation resolves that. It just creates a paper trail of the conflict.
In matrix organisations, this gets particularly messy. Someone asked me recently why their Prod Ops team felt like a “dumping ground” for orphan tasks. Because in a matrix, tasks without clear owners don’t disappear. They accumulate. And they accumulate wherever there’s capacity and a mandate vague enough to absorb them.
Third: The underlying incentives have to point roughly the same direction. If Sales is compensated on signed contracts regardless of deliverability, Marketing on MQLs regardless of conversion, and Product on features shipped regardless of adoption, you have a system designed to produce misalignment. Prod Ops can make this misalignment more visible. It cannot override incentive structures.
A colleague of mine ran Prod Ops at a series B company where the Sales VP openly admitted to promising features that weren’t on any roadmap. His commission depended on it. The Prod Ops team built beautiful intake processes and prioritisation frameworks. Sales ignored them because ignoring them was economically rational.
The Artefacts, Processes, and People Problem
Assuming you’ve got the prerequisites in place, here’s where it gets practical.
Most Prod Ops implementations fail because they focus on creating artefacts (templates, dashboards, documentation) without addressing processes (how work actually flows) or people (whether anyone will use the damn thing).
Artefacts are the easiest part. Anyone can build a Notion database or configure a Jira workflow. The templates look professional. They feel like progress. Leadership sees tangible output and assumes value has been created.
But an artefact nobody uses is just digital clutter.
Processes are harder. They require actually changing behaviour. Getting the sales team to log customer feedback in a consistent format. Convincing engineering leads to participate in standardised retrospectives. Ensuring that the data entering your dashboards is captured at the right moment in the right way.
This is change management, not operations. And it’s slow, frustrating work that doesn’t photograph well for quarterly updates.
People are the hardest. Prod Ops needs to hire or develop individuals who can operate across functional boundaries without formal authority. Who can push back on leadership without becoming defensive. Who understand both the data and the human dynamics underlying the data.
I’ve seen technically excellent Prod Ops leads fail because they couldn’t navigate politics. I’ve seen politically savvy ones fail because they didn’t understand product development well enough to earn credibility. The combination is rare.
How to Spot Whether Yours Is Helping or Hurting
If you already have a Product Ops function, here’s a diagnostic.
Signs it’s helping:
PMs say they have more time for customer work (and you believe them)
Cross-functional teams reference the same data when making decisions
Processes feel like scaffolding, not bureaucracy
The Prod Ops team can articulate their OKRs in terms of outcomes, not activities
Leadership uses Prod Ops insights to make actual decisions, including uncomfortable ones
Signs it’s hurting:
More meetings than before Prod Ops existed
Templates that nobody fills out correctly (or at all)
Dashboards that get built and then ignored
The Prod Ops team spends most of their time chasing people for compliance
Everyone agrees the processes are good “in theory”
When asked what Prod Ops does, people outside the team struggle to answer
The worst case is when Prod Ops becomes a performance of operational maturity rather than actual operational maturity. All the artefacts exist. The quarterly reviews look impressive. And nothing has actually changed about how work gets done.
What to Try if You’re Stuck
If you’re a Prod Ops lead watching your function struggle, or a product leader wondering why the investment isn’t paying off, here’s what I’d do.
Stop standardising for a month. Seriously. No new templates. No new processes. Just watch. Where are the real friction points? Not the ones people complain about in feedback surveys, but the ones that cause actual delays, rework, and frustration. These are rarely where you think they are.
Pick one workflow and make it undeniably better. Not “more documented.” Better. Faster. Less annoying. Something concrete that people will notice and appreciate. Build credibility through demonstrated impact, not comprehensive coverage.
Have the uncomfortable conversation about authority. If Prod Ops is supposed to standardise processes but has no authority to enforce them, you don’t have an operations function. You have a suggestions department. Either get explicit executive sponsorship with teeth, or be honest about the limitations.
Measure what matters to PMs, not what matters to slides. The metric that actually indicates Prod Ops value is whether product managers feel more effective. Survey them directly. Track their time allocation. If they’re spending the same amount of time in status meetings and filling out templates as before, your operational improvements are probably just different overhead.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
Here’s what I keep coming back to.
Product Ops is a good idea. In environments with reasonable executive alignment, clear decision rights, and coherent incentives, it absolutely closes execution gaps. I’ve seen it work.
But most companies don’t have those things. They have the appearance of alignment (we all agree on the strategy!), unclear decision rights obscured by collegial relationships, and incentives that subtly work against each other.
In those environments, installing Product Ops is like adding another violin section to an orchestra where the musicians are reading from different sheet music. The sound gets louder. It doesn’t get more harmonious.
“The gap between strategy and execution remains one of the most critical and persistent challenges for modern enterprises.”
True. But Prod Ops doesn’t close that gap by existing. It closes it by surfacing information that enables better decisions. And if your organisation systematically avoids information that would require uncomfortable changes, then Prod Ops either becomes complicit in that avoidance or becomes the enemy.
Neither outcome is what the function was designed for.
So before you hire that Head of Product Ops, ask yourself honestly: Do we actually want to know what’s broken? Are we prepared to act on what we learn?
If the answer is yes, Prod Ops can be transformational.
If the answer is “probably not, but we should still look like we’re doing something about execution,” save the headcount. You’ll need it when the next reorg happens.