At what size should a product org start thinking about having a product operations team?

I look at this question as more "when is my org ready for Product Ops" vs "what size should it be" :) Here are some signals for "ready" that I would use:

• You are probably struggling to scale the org. You have great people on the team but it’s gotten so big and complex that it’s just getting harder and harder to work and impacting the team.
• Your org structure might be more vertically aligned and working well in those structures, but there is nobody looking at the horizontal aspects of the org with enough focus to make an impact. Also, vice versa in this case too.
• You see some operationally minded people on the team who are already leaning into this role. Typically, there is someone who already showing you what you need by taking on the work in addition to their day job
• You write out a job description with clear statements to what they are accountable for, AND you can show that to everyone in the Product org and they won’t get confused/concerned about their role.

For some context, at realtor.com we were at about ~120 people in the product org when we started Product Ops. We also had very well established and defined Product Manager, Product Designer, Product Marketing Manager roles.

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 look at how your Product Managers are spending their time. Do they spend enough time on important-not-urgent responsibilities? (These would include competitive analysis, talking to customers/end users, defining goals & metrics, etc.) The elements of the product development lifecycle are critical for the success of your product – these are the superpowers of a PM!

If your PMs aren’t spending enough time on these activities, figure out where they are spending their time. I’m guessing they’ll say that they’re spending “too much time on execution,” but figure out what that actually means – are they:

• Driving project management and coordination?
• Pulling and analyzing usage data?
• Educating end users and driving adoption?
• Triaging fire-drills and noisy stakeholders?

Once you have a better understanding of the current state, you can figure out whether you want to solve it in a targeted way (investing in Product Marketing or Product Analytics) or if you want to bring in Product Ops to be more of a Swiss-Army Knife.