Rethinking Product Operations
What product operations looks like in a product-enabled company
Most advice about product operations assumes a product team that sets its own strategy, defines its own success metrics, and ships customer-facing software.
That’s not the reality in most large, non-tech companies.
In these environments, product is not the source of strategy; it’s the executor of it. Product work is entangled with policy, process, and platforms. Outputs are often invisible to customers. And teams are constantly translating someone else’s priorities into action.
If the product team looks different, the product operations team must too.
The Product-Enabled Operating Model: A Quick Reminder
In a product-enabled company, the product team is not the center of the business strategy because the “product” being built is not the product being sold. Product management is the connective tissue between business strategy, cross-functional operations, and digital execution. Product work is the mechanism through which change happens, not necessarily the initiator of that change.
This doesn’t make product teams less important. It just means they are structurally different. And that difference has profound implications for how you operationalize them.
The Role of Product Operations in the Product-Enabled Model
In any environment, product teams are pulled in multiple directions: translating business goals into roadmaps, surfacing user and internal pain points, aligning with engineering on feasibility, wrangling stakeholder needs, and measuring impact, all while maintaining some sense of cohesion.
Product ops steps in to create the scaffolding that holds this complexity together, and while the functional areas of product operations might be the same between product-led and product-enabled companies, the nature, depth, and intent of each function vary.
Here are some ways that product operations might function differently between models:
Tool Management Product-led: select and manage tools that optimize PM workflows Product-enabled: govern tools across multiple teams that intersect with product Process Standardization Product-led: codify best practices for autonomous product teams Product-enabled: operationalize alignment between product and other business units Planning Support Product-led: facilitate team-level planning within OKR or outcome-based frameworks Product-enabled: architect the planning model and translate strategy into initiatives and quarterly plans Data & Insights Product-led: provide analytics for faster product decisions Product-enabled: surface impact across systems, workflows, and internal adoption Discovery Enablement Product-led: support user interviews and product experiments Product-enabled: enable discovery across internal tools, policies, workflows, and constraints Cross-Functional Coordination Product-led: help PMs work with design, engineering, and GTM Product-enabled: operationalize collaboration across business units, operations, and compliance Communication Infrastructure Product-led: improve visibility into roadmaps and metrics Product-enabled: build shared language and artifacts that translate product work for the business Onboarding & Training Product-led: ramp up PMs on tools and customer context Product-enabled: train PMs to navigate org complexity, decision rights, and cross-functional dynamics
The reasons for the functional differences for a product ops team in product-enabled businesses come down to three things:
The product operations team needs to reflect an organization where the product org is reliant on stakeholder partnership to execute on business strategy, so it is less self-contained optimization and more outward-facing.
Shared processes need to be inclusive of teams that manage internal-facing products and 3rd party tools, which often differ, especially in discovery and measurement.
Understanding of product management outside the org is usually limited, and thus communication from product teams to stakeholders and leadership requires a different type of “translation.”
In a product-enabled model, operations is not an optimization function. You’re not making a machine more efficient. You’re making the machine possible.
Common Missteps in Structuring Product Ops
Even when the need for product operations is clear, many organizations misapply the function. They focus on surface-level fixes or default to familiar structures without addressing the deeper operational needs of a product-enabled company. A few familiar traps:
Mistaking tools for systems - buying a roadmap tool doesn’t fix your prioritization problem, because prioritization isn’t an exercise in documenting things in order; it’s a cross-functional alignment activity.
Treating product ops as support - product ops is a strategic function, not meant to be meeting note-takers or meeting coordinators. Their function needs authority, not access.
Under-resourcing the function - one overwhelmed ops lead cannot solve a systems-level problem across many teams; you can’t scale operations with a spreadsheet and one smart person.
Copying rituals without clarifying purpose - a ritual like quarterly planning only works if it reflects the way your organization makes decisions; without clarity and customization, it’s too superficial to have long-term impact.
Forgetting to operationalize transformation - new ways of working disintegrate quickly if they’re not baked into the daily structure of how product happens.
Failing to align well with finance and investment processes - product plans need to be connected to how the business allocates funding and resources; product ops is the best way to bridge the gap between prioritization and investment, specifically translating roadmaps into finance language.
What It Takes
To build product operations in a product-enabled company, you start by acknowledging the real constraints: strategy lives outside the product organization, execution requires orchestration, and your product managers are probably doing too much with too little support.
Product operations, in this model, is the infrastructure that makes product possible, not just more efficient. It creates the connective structures, shared language, and systemic support that turn strategic intent into durable execution.
This article is the first in a series exploring what it takes to make product work in the real-world complexity of non-tech, product-enabled organizations.