Clare Hawthorne
Senior Director, Product Operations, Oscar Health
About
Product leader with extensive cross-functional experience, including Account Management, Customer Success, Finance and Human Resources. Strong believer in the power of enterprise SaaS to improve overall collaboration, creativity and delivery. Deep......more
Content
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 22
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
4474 Views
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 22
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
1684 Views
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 22
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
1233 Views
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 22
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
1086 Views
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 22
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
1081 Views
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 22
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
1005 Views
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 22
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
890 Views
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 22
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
630 Views
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 22
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
590 Views
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 22
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
558 Views
Credentials & Highlights
Senior Director, Product Operations at Oscar Health
Top Product Management Mentor List
Product Management AMA Contributor
Top 10 Product Management Contributor
Lives In New York, NY
Knows About Product Operations