Product Ops is real. Although line between product management & product ops is quite blur at the moment, but overtime latter will become specialised with product ops becoming a core part of product management.
There are tonnes of operational work which has gotten associated with product management which needs a first class specialised functional place in the organisation.
Ops work in product includes:
- trying to get consolidated analytics reports from different tools used across functions ( internal ops portal, attribution tools, playstore etc )
- coordinating with market research teams / agencies to conduct quant and qual surveys,
- managing feature flags on a regular basis
- coordinating with Design / engineering teams on Figma for seamless design / asset handover
- coordinating with program managers to do sprint reviews
- running drip campaigns at every step of product journey to improve conversion
- sending ad hoc communication to customers during system downtimes
- coordinating with legal to close out NDAs / contracts
- generating daily/weekly/monthly conversion metrics from analytics tools
- working with engineering managers to get feature estimation points
- coordinating with vendors for integration unblocking and then vendor performance monitoring
- giving sessions to customer support team about new released features .
Earlier all of this work used to be either handled by product managers further over stretching them or dumped to some analyst, but building a dedicated role for this will help product functions deliver better products faster to customers
