A look back at my 2021
This year I decided to start doing a retrospective on the year gone by in my small world as a way to remember the wins and challenges.
Covid19, still disrupting our lives
I won’t labour the point around the impact of Covid19 on my year. Like almost everyone, the pandemic had an impact and did create a “different” year, building on the already strange year of 2020. Despite that, I feel I was luckier than many and beyond being more limited in my movements and comfort, I was able to have a year packed with positives.
Still, the world almost all seems remote beyond my immediate circle. My colleagues have in truth become digital entities and masks seem like a permanent accessory even though I know we’re getting closer to leaving them behind.
Amazing though is the amount of opportunities that it has created to build my network and connections that normally would be more complicated. Scheduling an online coffee has become common place, and I don’t have to wait for an event to chat with peers or people I look up too.
Kudos to John Cutler for being so accessible and always being available to hop on a call and throw around some ideas.
Supporting a ReOrg and constant learning
The year started with a huge reorganisation and restructuring in our business unit and our Product Ops team was tasked with supporting the team through that reorg.
This meant understanding, interpreting and translating the vision and purpose our VP had for the team. This included huge changes in the organisation of the teams, the ways of working and in how the Product Managers looked at the product we were building.
Like any organisation that has reached a substantial size, there are many challenges, whether the teams/people are open to that change or not:
- Legacy processes that have become the norm and changes seem to have a domino affect that impact so much beyond the processes we’re changing. Trying to account for that impact and prepare for it is a huge challenge.
- Complexity in translating the vision for the change properly. Even when the vision is clear and strong, being able to translate it to the team working on the ground level is hard, especially because the team doesn’t have the luxury to stop working on current work. They have to keep things moving, so they’re essentially juggling at least two ways of working and two types of work.
- Legacy systems similar to legacy processes can easily become a blocker. When teams or organisations have spent years using a specific system or software, the amount of time and effort invested means that moving away from it seems like a huge undergoing. At this stage, we jump between trying to improve current systems, adding extra systems to facilitate certain parts or scrapping current systems for new ones. The decision may seem easy, but it never truly is.
Beyond all the challenges though, I think myself, Bruno Torres Boeger and Chris Compston and our leader Kuldeep Salhan extracted so many learnings from the process.
For me, the main learnings were:
- Understanding the importance of translating the vision from leadership to the teams effectively.
- Building on the previous point, how easily the perception versus the reality of how teams are interpreting the vision can often be completely different from each other.
- How leadership roles have an important role in helping guide and support the teams and have a huge impact on how the team accepts the changes.
- Accepting that the mess will never truly go away and we need to find ways of working with it, rather than trying to control it.
- Sometimes we need to take a step back to realise the actual impact we’ve had. Being in the middle of the mess, we may not realise this.
- Transparency is powerful and empowering although understanding the right time and level of transparency is even more important. Too little can create distrust, too much can create confusion and stress. Finding that balance is an art form in itself.
- It’s easy to fall into the pattern of overthinking a topic. There comes a point where we need to make things move forward. We found that our team seems to be good at helping others forcing things to move forward.
This is just a quick summary of the main outcomes of a very rich year for us as a team. I suggest reading the various articles we posted across Medium and the Product-Led Alliance site.
Contributing to Product Ops
From the very beginning, we as a team decided we wanted to help grow Product Operations as a discipline.
This year we did our best to become advocates for the discipline on various fronts which I’ll go into further detail below:
- Global Product Ops Community / Clubhouse chats
- Articles
- Communities
- Events
- Podcasts
Beyond that, we also created the Global Product Ops Community on the 10th February 2021, which had the purpose of bringing together Product Operations professional or people interested in Product Operations.
At first we created the slack channel, but after realising that there are a few more communities already discussing Product Operations (see below) we didn’t want to compete, but rather build on what others are already doing.
Clubhouse chat
We created monthly clubhouse chats for the Product Operations community. Each month we have a chat on a topic related to Product Operations.
At first myself, Bruno Torres Boeger and Chris Compston would host the sessions and propose the topics. We would then open up the mic for others to voice their opinions or ask questions.
With the format, we quickly realised we wanted to give others the chance to propose topics and share their views from the start, so we changed things a bit. We now have guest hosts who propose a topic and the run the session, with our help in the admin and helping keep the conversation going.
Thanks to our hosts so far that helped make this year’s conversations so rich, Kayla Medellin, Christian MacLean, Derya Tavozar and Antonia Landi.
We’re already working with the next host for the January edition!
P.S. If you would like to suggest a topic or host, reach out to one of us and we’ll see about making that happen!
Articles
I’ve been a bit quiet on the article front, because I made a pact with myself that if I couldn’t bring any actual value to the discussion or a novel way of looking at something, it just wasn’t worth adding more noise to the pile.
II’ve seen this in my experience with the design industry, most topics have been exhaustively explored by people with much more experience and know how than I have. Just changing the words, while saying the same things just didn’t seem right.
With the shift into the Product Operations space, I quickly realised there is a lot of missing resources and I thought I could help the discipline a bit. I managed to publish 2 articles and I have a few more in the backlog and I hope my experience helps others in an industry that is only now starting it’s journey towards reaching maturity.
- Oct 19th — Perception, blindness, regrouping and action
This article is roughly based on a slack conversation between myself and Chris Compston, Product Operations Principal at Farfetch, where we explored various topics such as perception, communication and managing changes. - Nov 2nd — The Ops of Ops
Why the sudden surge in operations related roles across product development disciplines? What is the connective tissue and where do they differ? What can they learn from each other? These are some of the questions we hope to answer in this article.
Although only two articles, I feel like they did bring value and the quality surpasses quantity 😋
Communities
As I mentioned above, there already exist two communities that although their main focus isn’t on Product Operations, they do have groups discussing the area and in both cases, I feel they were both very important in helping evolve the discipline and it’s professionals.
Although reasonably new, this community run by Heather James and team has quickly become a reference, by providing a great community, events and resources for its members.
The community has also done an incredible service to the area of Product Operations by running 2 online summits on 1 real world summit in London this year, giving us space in the slack community and also creating a hub of content and resources specifically geared towards Product Operations.
They also sponsored the Product Ops Podcast, hosted by Gerisha Nadaraju
As suggested by Gerisha Nadaraju, we reached out to this community and after an initial chat with Aušrinė Keršanskaitė, we were allowed to join this community of people across various Ops fields.
This community does an incredible job of making things seem cosy and like a group of friends, while still providing opportunities to connect to people in other Ops related fields, while also creating some impact on people new to the field or looking to move into the field of Product Operations.
Events
As I mentioned above, I think the Product-Led Alliance was important in both connecting various people in the world of Product Operations and giving them a voice.
1st Product Ops Summit
I can almost trace all my Product Operations related interactions this year back to this first event (12th February) and between hearing others speak about Product Operations and the quick rounds of networking, I got to meet quite a few people with whom I still chat.
I think this first event was an important mark in the history of Product Operations.
2nd Product Ops Summit
I’ll admit I was expecting the next event to only happen in the following year, but the Product-Led Alliance team are always on the move and scheduled the second event for the 9th September.
I was honoured to be invited to speak at the event as opening speaker . Below is a write up of the talk for anyone interested:
- A user-centered approach to Product Ops — looks at how we may apply user centered methodologies and mindset to Product Operations
Our team was also represented by Chris Compston in a round table on the topic of the pillars of Product Operations.
Again, the event helped me catchup with people I knew while also meeting new people and expanding my network even further.
Product Ops Unwrapped — Ask me Anything
Another great moment was getting invited to participate in the Product Ops Unwrapped series organised by Anabela Cesário and Patricia Cadete.
In this Ask me Anything I was joined by Anabela Cesário, Gerisha Nadaraju an Kevin Sakamoto to answer questions on Product Operations.
You can view the episode here.
Podcasts
Product Ops Podcast — A bit after the first Product Ops Summit, I met Gerisha Nadaraju on a topic related to the Global Community. At the time, Gerisha shared with us that she was creating the Product Ops Podcast and so didn’t have much free time.
A few months later, Gerisha invited me to participate on the podcast and share my experience, having come from a design background into Product Ops. You can listen to the episode here.
Product Ops People — Following the second Product Ops Summit, I was contacted by Simon Hilton asking me if I would join him as a guest on his Ops related podcast Product Ops People and again, I was happy to participate.
The great thing about Simon’s invitation? I was able to meet Simon, learn about a new Podcast related to our area and lastly, share my experience and ideas with others. You can listen to the episode here.
Both podcasts were a great moment of discussion and I hope to have the opportunity to do it more in the future!
Looking forward to 2022
Clearly this year was very interesting in terms of both my experience and all the great things happening around Product Operations.
It has become clear that Product Operations is growing and the community is growing as well with more and more companies hiring for this role and quite a few interesting debates around what Product Ops is and it’s value. I have my own opinions here, but still open to expanding that opinion as I learn from others.
I’ve also taken on a new challenge leading Product Operations at OLX in the Motors area and in the short time since I joined, I already feel we’re doing some very interesting explorations and I’m looking forward to what this year brings.
How was your 2021 journey? Are you able to extract positives and learnings? How much are you looking forward to 2022!
Happy new year to all!
List of all the resources referenced in this article:
- Product-Led Alliance on Medium
- Product-Led Alliance resources
- Global Product Ops community on Slack
- Global Product Ops community on Twitter
- Ops Stories Community
- Product Ops Podcast
- Product Ops People Podcast
- Article — Perception, blindness, regrouping and action
- Article — The Ops of Ops
- Article — Product Ops is here, what next?
- Article — A user-centered approach to Product Ops
- Article — Pillars of Product Operations