AMA: Oscar Health Director, Product Operations, Clare Hawthorne on Product Operations
March 23 @ 10:00AM PST
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Oscar Health Director, Product Operations, Clare Hawthorne on Product Operations
Top Questions
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 23
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 d......Read More
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Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 23
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) St......Read More
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How can product operations and revenue operations align on strategic company goals?
I’m in revenue operations and my role requires me to essentially be the connective tissue/muscle between senior leadership and the business operations and product operations teams . However, I’m finding that product operations as well as business operations cannot agree on how to prioritize product enhancement requests and how these requests should support the overall strategic goals of the company. I’d love to hear if this is common and how to bridge the gap between the three functions .
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 23
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 at......Read More
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Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 23
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 ma......Read More
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What do you see as an ideal organizational structure and placement for Product Ops?
What is a good ratio of Product Ops people to Product Managers?
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 23
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 Produc......Read More
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Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 23
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 Oper......Read More
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Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 23
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 un......Read More
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Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 23
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......Read More
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Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 23
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 a......Read More
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What is your strategy for product operations and how are you measuring progress towards it?
I am interested to understand how leaders are setting up their overall strategic direction and goals for product operations, as well as measuring progress.
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 23
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......Read More
1124 Views
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Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 23
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. 1. Product Operations is not a function to make the life of a Product Manager better or ......Read More
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Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 23
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. –......Read More
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