What is your strategy for product operations and how are you measuring progress towards it?

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 work that adds value. Sometimes it’s hard to measure outcomes, but people should be able to feel the value you’ve unlocked for the team! Instead of stressing about metrics, I’d focus on establishing Product Ops’ reputation as a team that gets-s***-done and contributes to the department (and company) results.

So, in our first year of Product Ops at Oscar, I was less focused on capturing quantifiable metrics and more interested in building our brand within the Product Team. Each quarter members of my team would agree to a “roadmap” of high value work with their PM counterparts, using a prioritization framework we had developed. At the end of each quarter, each team member would summarize the impact of their key projects, usually focusing on the amount of PM or Engineering time saved. Even though we didn’t have a universal success metric, PMs and Engineers saw the value we brought to their pods and started advocating for additional Product Ops staffing in 2022.

In 2022, I’m growing our team by more than 2x, but we will only have ~70% coverage of our feature pods (and no Product Ops allocation to our ~10 Infrastructure pods). I’m currently working on ways we can quantifiably measure the impact that Product Ops has on the pods that we are allocated to. This will also help us decide as a Tech Leadership team (Product AND Engineering) whether we want to continue to grow the team further.

While I haven’t put it into place yet, my plans are to survey the key stakeholders on each pod (Product Managers, Engineers, Product Designers and Product Ops) and to capture how much time each group is spending on their “highest value.” My hypothesis is that when a pod has a fully-ramped, embedded Product Ops team member, everyone will spend a greater percentage of time on “high value” work – including Product Ops.

Note: My definition of “highest value” is still a work in progress, but here are a few examples:

• Product Managers – Industry Research, Product Vision & Strategy
• Product Designers – Prototyping, User Research,
• Engineering – Technical Design, Systems Architecture
• Product Operations – Process Optimization, Enabling Self-Service