Product Operations: Six Tasks That Return Time to Product Managers

By Nathan Brooks

Pendo’s product operations team manages six recurring responsibilities. Its promise: return time to product managers without losing customer context. As roles evolved, more companies hired product operations managers; LinkedIn data cited in the article shows rising interest in the role and skill. Product operations reaches beyond administration into roadmaps, data and cross-team decisions.

Why has the product manager’s role changed?

Early product managers worked from instinct, handling every request and rarely examining the underlying problem so the customer could learn. Modern product managers use data and experiments.

The job changed in three ways:

• Fixed requirements became iterative experiments.
• Shipping features became shaping the business.
• Selling a product became treating the product as the first moment of truth.

Today, the product is the experience. Internal coordination now belongs inside product work.

What do product managers and product operations own?

Product managers solve external users’ pain quickly by improving the product. Product operations handles internal communication, process and scale across technology-building and user-facing teams. Product and design sit at the center, while onboarding, technical support, customer advocacy and lead generation attract leads, serve customers and grow the customer base; product operations coordinates these groups.

Founder and CEO of Produx Labs Melissa Perri said: “Product ops is about setting up a system in the product organization to get the right data – both quantitative and qualitative – from the right places into the process for creating better products.”

Head of Product Ops at Stripe Blake Samic said: “I define product ops as building the connective tissue between teams building your technology and the teams who interact with your users.”

Netcore Solutions Group Vice President and Business Head Varun Ramamurthy Dinakar used an audio analogy: the volume knob is the product; equalizer settings tune the experience; product operations supplies the configurations.

The boundary matters: product managers own customer problems and direction; product operations owns the system around that work.

Why did Pendo create the function?

Pendo had too few product managers for its customer volume. The ratio heightened errors, miscommunication and misalignment, leaving less room to build products users love and win more of the market. The company formed product operations to remove that constraint.

It works when customer evidence, tools and cross-team coordination need to travel reliably.

What are the six responsibilities?

At Pendo, the team focuses on alignment, communication, process and scale.

1. Build the product operations stack. Ensure the product tool stack helps the product organization work efficiently rather than adding friction.
2. Oversee work-production excellence. Partner with technical success on escalations and highest-priority issues; collect data and review customer-health measures: feature adoption (use of a capability), app retention (continued use over time), product engagement score (an interaction measure), bugs, revenue and stickiness (a user-retention tendency).
3. Influence roadmap decisions. Combine Net Promoter Score (NPS), a customer-loyalty measure, with general feedback so customer needs shape priorities.
4. Collaborate with stakeholders. Work with support teams. Product managers are the primary internal customers, followed by revenue teams that need to understand product value; end customers remain the ultimate goal.
5. Guide experiments. Identify which ideas merit testing, define success and track results.
6. Support releases. Work with product marketing to launch features effectively and close gaps in stakeholder knowledge about core functions and new releases.

The tasks form one chain: evidence and tools enter, priorities and experiments follow, and communication carries the result into action.

What skills and authority does the role need?

Three qualities anchor the role: data focus, efficiency drive and customer centricity. Managers collect, organize and analyze product data; manage the tool stack and help teams use it; create and carry out product strategy with sales and marketing; implement and track experiments; and make key operational decisions with a VP of Product or CPO.

The role manages systems rather than replacing product judgment; product managers still decide which customer problem and direction matter most.

When does a company need product operations?

Four warning signs may prompt consideration:

• More than one product team.
• Multiple offerings.
• Rapid growth or expansion.
• Missing process and a need for scale.

Any one is a prompt to assess the model, not an automatic mandate. Common tools cover prototyping, road mapping, A/B testing, onboarding, data analysis, heat mapping and knowledge management; the article separately points to a list of 199+ tools for product-led growth.

Its FAQ says product managers align design, engineering and business around customer value; product operations managers handle daily development plus companywide data collection, tracking and analysis for major decisions, not one product.

It calls operations higher and broader than production: operations covers operational practices, cost-effectiveness and best practices; production covers planning, creation and customer experience.

When coordination is the constraint, the intended gains are more product-manager time, better communication, organizational alignment and closer contact with customer problems.

What should product managers do next?

The article also promotes a new, on-demand Product-Led Growth Certificate for product managers. It offers a holistic view of product-led growth and asks how to choose free versus freemium plans, which features to give away or place behind a paywall, how pricing can prompt upgrades, and how onboarding can expose more users to product value.

Completion certifies participants as Product-Led Growth Leaders.

Product practice is moving toward a tighter division of labor: product managers interpret customer problems, while product operations keeps data, experiments and cross-functional systems coherent.