The Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles Hypothesis: Product Operations Provide Infrastructure for High-Quality Product Decision-Making
Dive deeper into Melissa and Denise’s book as we explore the three principles of product operations and the responsibilities and values that come with a great product leader.
Meet Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles, the dynamic duo behind the groundbreaking book “Product Operations: How Successful Companies Build Better Products at Scale.” Melissa's expertise spans from founding Produx Labs, a product management training and consulting company, to spearheading product strategies at esteemed companies like Insight Partners, Capital One, Vanguard, and Walmart/Sam’s Club. Meanwhile, Denise brings over a decade of product leadership experience at Condé Nast, Cision, and Understood.org to the table. Together, they have driven meaningful outcomes for various businesses through their targeted support in product operations, design, and coaching.
Dive deeper into Melissa and Denise’s book as we explore the three principles of product operations, the responsibilities and values that come with a great product leader, and how effective product operations lead to more impactful product outcomes.
Resource Links
Check out Melissa and Denise’s book, Product Operations
Check out Melissa’s book, Escaping the Build Trap
Learn more about Melissa on her website
Learn more about Denise on her website
Visit the Product Science Group website
Explore Product Science Workshops and Courses
Quotes from Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles:
“I see this connection between continuous discovery and a team's capacity for creativity... If you have the time available to you and space has been made to think deeply about what's actually valuable to the people that you're creating things for, I think that puts you in a creative space.” - Denise Tilles
“Try to show people what you can do as quickly as possible so they realize the value. The more that you can achieve value for people and help them realize it, the more buy-in you're going to get.” - Melissa Perri
“The customer and market insights is really about aggregating all the feedback that we're hearing from our customers, from all different parts of the organization... Where do those live? And how do we make sure that people can read those studies, understand what has been asked of customers, use it to identify problems and put back into their work, and then also, where do they go to help contact customers?” - Melissa Perri
Lab Notes
Lab Note 601.1: Product ops ties into each of the Product Science Principles.
“Product ops really ties into all three [principles] because evidence-based product strategy is all about having a clear understanding of the strategy for the whole team, not just the product leader or product manager who created the strategy or developed it or synthesized it.” - Holly Hester-Reilly (31:25)
Lab Note 601.2: Centralizing product operations is worth it.
“We're going to stand up continuous discovery practices, and as we go to do that, we will find what blockers there are and we will break them down, and we will build systems, and put infrastructure in place.” - Holly Hester-Reilly (35:34)
Lab Note 601.3: The work of product operations has been around longer than the name.
“It's more about what hats need to be worn and identifying what skills exist in the individuals that you have within your organization, and then deciding who's going to wear what hat, than it is about having an official job title with an official set of responsibilities that must be the same in every company.” - Holly Hester-Reilly (36:23)
Lab Note 601.4: On a small, growing team, hire product ops before research ops.
“I would imagine you would start with product ops before you would do research ops, because research ops is probably even more specialized than product ops. But when you are at a bigger company and you're growing, maybe research ops becomes a function as well, once you need more in that space than you can handle with your current team size.” - Holly Hester-Reilly (38:07)
Lab Note 601.5: Organization of your insights goes a long way toward driving evidence-based product decisions.
“Something that I've done with Holly before is organize that into essentially a database of evidence from customers, including tags [for] customer feedback from this client about this topic, and using that as a new way to slice and dice the qualitative data from the users, from the customers, in order to incorporate the continuous discovery and be able to share it when the time is right.” - Dina Levitan (40:05)
Lab Note 601.6: Product Operations may be an opportunity to systematically bring design in earlier in the product discovery and strategy process.
“Potentially, product ops could also facilitate [early involvement] for a designer by having some kind of centralized, standardized way of capturing product strategy thinking and then delivering that in a way that's relevant to designers and is tailored.” - Mark Enache (43:06)
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