My latest article on #productManagement, "Product ops drives product culture", went live on @MindtheProduct today. It's targeted at product leaders who are trying to improve their org's product culture.

mindtheproduct.com/product-ops-dr…

Most product managers don't realize that they have a treasure trove of customer feedback just waiting for them. I sure didn't. "If I'm supposed to be customer centric how do I get better at tracking and making sense of customer feedback?" With the help of colleagues like jaja, @beh_zod, @natatouille, @jennydove, and @danwolch I break this down into three primary buckets:

1. Collecting feedback
2. Organizing and prioritizing
3. Generating insights

Within feedback collection it's easy to overlook that treasure trove.
There are five straightforward places you have to access feedback *without* doing deeper interviewing and discovery.
▶️ Longitudinal surveys - like CSAT, NPS, or even CES (effort score)
▶️ Sales calls - these are happening all the time and you need to join them
▶️ Customer support - hundreds or thousands of touchpoints every month come through your support team
▶️ Direct email outreach - you don't need to structure a gigantic survey; send someone a personal email!
▶️ Ratings and reviews - app stores? G2? even Yelp!

Once you've identified the places then you need to organize the information:
💻 Spreadsheets - turns out this is still one of the best ways to organize information. You can sort, filter, annotate, and remember: pivot tables are your friend.

✅ Task managers - send that feedback into Notion, Coda, Asana or something else entirely and create an infinite number of additional views.

🚿 Slack firehose - engage with feedback in realtime, tag other people, and have quick back-and-forth conversations to parse the feedback

🖱 Sales/AM submission - create a submission form for your stakeholders to submit targeted information gathered on a call; useful if you can't be there.

🗓 Monthly support recap - the thousands of support tickets are only as useful as the system you have to organize them. Learn how you can train your CS team to build a better system.

After collecting and organizing you've still got to generate insights. But how?
⚡ Group, categorize, tag - I'll share the system we used at ResortPass to quantify feedback, identify patterns, and attach to our roadmap.

🧠 Written knowledge base - Behzod shares details on the "What do we know about X" wiki they used at Slack.

⬇ Bias minimization and Topic modeling - Crystal shares her three part framework for reducing bias, separating signal from noise and modeling topics (pre-LLM)

🤖 LLMs - all hail the rise of the robots! Natalie shares a company she's observed that's turbo-charging insight generation from customer feedback The newsletter is below and I'd love to hear from people about their favorite non-obvious product feedback mechanism.

"The history that makes me excited for product ops' future" buff.ly/3uHq7DW @jennydove

This app’s logo turning to @X on my phone actually makes me want to delete it. It is just serving as a reminder of negativity. Anyone else or just me?

Why are you A/B testing that feature? Wrong answers only.

To run a great product team, you need to understand where the team is operating well and struggling.

This workshop is designed to equip you with the frameworks you need to run a successful product operations assessment.

buff.ly/3JSEs5k

Understand who is doing the work today, how to categorize it, and create a structure for how you want to incorporate product operations work into your day-to-day team functions.

Use code TWITTER23 for a complimentary workshop ticket.

buff.ly/3JSEs5k

"Bringing Shadow Product Operations Into the Light: Recognizing Hidden Contributions" w/ Jenny Wanger (@jennydove) is just one of the great talks at #Agile2023. Don't miss the world's biggest #Agile event!

agilealliance.org/agile2023/

#RoadtoAgile2023 #ProductManagement #ProdOps

The product data tech stack is ever-evolving and mission-critical.

What's in your stack?

If your prodOps work is always "on the side" it isn't going to be sustainable.

How do you fix this?

Bring the work into the light.

🙏 Acknowledge their contributions
📝 Make it part of the job description
🏆 Attach it to goals or OKRs
🙅‍♀️ Say it's not something you're going to invest in

I dive in way deeper in this week's newsletter – subscribe to get this straight into your inbox! jennywanger.com/subscribe

Check out @jennydove's and 7 other thought leaders’ responses to 8 questions about Product Operations in our new eBook, "Product Ops: Beyond the Hype"!

🔗 Download your FREE copy now: lnkd.in/d7CGFEAV

The best strategies, executed poorly (or at all), will never succeed.

Mediocre strategies, executed well, stand a fighting chance.

That's why I'm so obsessed with operations.

You think product operations sounds worthwhile, but are totally confused on where to begin.

I'm leading a 1.5 hr workshop for people who are trying to wrap their heads around tackling the product operations work at their organization.

buff.ly/44fpxK6

It's for teams considering bringing in a product ops specialist or who just want to get their work today under control.

You'll learn about the pillars of product ops, the pros and cons of some operating models, and create a list of people in your org doing the work today.

📚 Check out our brand new eBook, "Product Ops: Beyond the Hype"! lnkd.in/d7CGFEAV

Explore the latest strategies and insights from industry experts:
@landi_antonia, Casey Flinn, @ndxcc, Gabby Peralta, @joshmcla, Thaís Rigolon, @dtilles, @jennydove.

What is product operations anyway?

@MindtheProduct published my explainer.

Four areas of focus:

- Using data
- Understanding users
- Team ownership
- Cross-departmental communication

buff.ly/3qXgIX9

Make it easy for people to behave a certain way, and they will.

Too many product leaders wonder why they are struggling to get culture changes to happen. Changing the way product managers do things makes life harder.

Try to make things easier and give them the space to change.

Your roadmaps don't exist, or are just a list of features. What should you do?

Don't panic. Every company had no roadmap at one point in time.

Like any other product process, start with user research. Why do you want roadmaps, what purpose do they fill for the organization?

Make sure everyone agrees on what elements can help fufil that purpose. If you need inspiration, @simplybastow and @iamctodd have a plethora of awesome resources and commentary on the topic.

@simplybastow @iamctodd Create a simple template. A spreadsheet will do.

Try it out for a little while! Document what works and what doesn't.

Iterate.

No fancy tools, no complicated forms to fill out. Just get your first experiment going, measure, and learn. Same as any other product process.