AMA: Oscar Health Director, Product Operations, Clare Hawthorne on Product Operations

Given that it’s such a nascent function, I think there’s a lot of flexibility – I see that as a good thing! But I know the flexibility can also be daunting, so here’s how I talk about it with my team. Once you’ve been a Product Operations Manager, I think there are four primary paths: 1) Stay in Product Operations – “level up” within Product Operations and find a way to increase the scope or complexity of what you’re working on. At Oscar we have 6 levels for Product Ops, from Associate to Direct ...Read More

My “north star” vision for the Product Operations team is to “unlock Oscar’s ability to ship more product, better and faster.” While this is a pretty broad statement, I want to highlight a few elements. Product Operations is not a function to make the life of a Product Manager better or easier. We do not “support” Product Managers. Our focus is unlocking Oscar’s capacity to ship software. In our context, this means that Product Ops focuses on the goals and delivery of our engineering pods. If th ...Read More

Unfortunately there’s no perfect ratio – each Product Ops team I’ve run or learned about has a very different structure and mandate! I’ve heard of successful models with Product Ops to PM ratios of 50:1 and of 1:1, so it’s less about the number and more about working with what you have. If you understand the pain points of product leadership and front line PMs, you’ll be able to develop a strategy that delivers value to the Product team regardless of the number of resources you have. That being ...Read More

Great question! As I’ve spoken to other Product Operations leaders, I’ve found that the team structure and role varies widely from company to company. Coming into Oscar Health, I initially assumed I would organize my team around different skills sets – data & analytics, product enablement, etc. – but ultimately, that structure didn’t address the business need for having deep domain expertise within Product Ops. After a few different experiments, we decided that most of the Product Ops team w ...Read More

As mentioned in another question, my “north star” for Product Operations is to “unlock Oscar’s ability to ship more product, better and faster.” The majority of my team does this by embedding within engineering pods, but everyone can contribute to this goal. As an example, in the last year I took on an outsourcing project, tech-wide coordination for our peak selling season and (partially) redesigned our roadmap process. While measuring success is important, it’s more important to actually do the ...Read More

In my experience, it’s worked out extremely well to have Product Operations report directly to the Head of Product. Here at Oscar, I directly report into Jesse Horowitz, our Chief Product Officer and sit on his leadership team. This allows me to have full visibility into and alignment with Product’s priorities and staffing, which allows me to make global trade-offs. I’ve found this structure to be extremely effective. Other alternatives I’ve seen: Product Ops rolling up into Operations – this ca ...Read More

Oscar Health is the first company I’ve worked in with both Product Ops and PMO (Program Management Office), so I can share how we think about the distinction in our context. As I shared, the bulk of Product Ops is embedded within specific engineering pods – my team is expected to be subject matter experts of the domain areas they cover. So, if the work is domain specific and execution related, chances are high it will go to Product Operations. In contrast, our Program Managers are aligned to wid ...Read More

I’m going to give the classic infuriating answer: It depends. But I know that answer isn’t particularly useful, so here’s how I would think about it. Product Operations creates leverage for an existing Product Management team – therefore, you need a certain amount of scale for Product Ops to deliver impact. Taken to an extreme, I wouldn’t advocate that a company’s second product hire be Product Operations. So if it’s not Product hire #2, is it hire #10? #20? #50? To answer that question, I’d loo ...Read More

My go-to resource for Product Ops right now is PLA They have great blog posts and a Product Ops Summit (at least once per year, maybe twice?). My favorite aspect is their PLA Slack community – they have a specific Product Ops channel and folks are very generous with their time to share thoughts and best practices. I’ve also used it to set up 1:1 networking chats, which were invaluable as I was defining the Product Ops strategy at Oscar. Many of the prolific Product blogs (like Pendo.io, Product ...Read More

I’m actively hiring for several Product Operations roles, including for Associate Product Operations Managers, so you can check out the specific job descriptions on our career page! Beyond what we’ve posted, here are some of the things I share with our interviewer panel. Associate Product Operations Managers & Product Operations Managers What I look for: Solves problems -- effectively fixes an issue in the short term and adapts processes to address its root cause in the long term. Strong col ...Read More

I can’t answer this question specifically, because I haven’t worked closely with a revenue operations function. But here are a few thoughts about aligning on priority and company goals more generally. First, acknowledge that strategic alignment is hard – the frequently adopted OKR framework attempts to align teams around common objectives and goals, but it is no easy feat! If you’re having a hard time agreeing with your partners in business ops and product ops, it might be worth resetting the co ...Read More

Here at Oscar, we’re fortunate to have a robust Product Analytics team that sits within our Data function. Our Product Managers work directly with Product Analytics and build dashboards. As a result, Product Ops doesn’t have specific analytics or data responsibilities, which is different from how some Product Ops teams are scoped. (Pendo’s definition of Product Ops, for example, likes to include product analytics/usage within the scope of Product Ops: “Product ops pros are often responsible for ...Read More