Product Operations: How successful companies build better products at scale

I got this as a holiday gift to myself to follow up me finishing Escaping the Build Trap, Melissa Perri's other 5 star book on Product Management, over a previous vacation. This book is an easy to digest guide to help organizations augment the power of Product Management vs expecting them to handle all duties not squarely within the realm of other teams at a company - Marketing, Sales, Engineering, etc. Furthermore, the book collects pragmatic advice from individuals who have built and operated Product Ops at various companies vs utopic comments that have minimal chance of seeing daylight - let alone success. As an experienced PM, I've lived through some of the issues the book highlights and I can definitely see how Melissa's and Denisse's advice could've worked for me and can work in my current and future endeavors. I recommend this book to any product manager or leader seeking to augment the impact their teams can have on a company. My only suggestion for a future version or perhaps as a blog post/podcast follow up would be a deeper dive into backgrounds and schools of experience for individuals seeking to shift into this vertical. Since Product Ops is fairly new, a solid addition to the ground-level advice on the book would have been a lengthier discussion on who to seek to fill Product Ops leadership roles.

While for my specific purposes I wish some of the framing had been less b2b and large-team focused (I work for a 140 person company and it's d2c, I thought the book did a great job of keep it vague enough for any eager product opts dabbler to take the framework and overlay it on to their own situation, and actionable enough that I was able to turn around and implement some changes the day after reading. At the end of the day, no book is going to give you all the answers to your problems, but if it can inspire you and get your wheels turning, isn't solving problems what product ops people do best anyway? Writing style was also easy and smooth to read so it never felt like a chore to get through

After 20+ years working in product there are still opportunities to learn and grow. This book came out at the right time as so many of us Product Leaders are trying to take our teams to the next level. You’re doing discovery. You’ve escaped the build trap. But have you put Product Operations into place? Melissa and Denise give you a practical playbook to understand, implement, and level up using Product Operations. I found the mix of explanations and stories helpful to really understand the finer details. My copy is already heavily notated and dog-eared. The format and content is really well done and I know that I’ll be going back to it a lot. If you’re a Product Leader, then Product Operations is essential reading.

The role of product has become so multi-faceted over the last ten years, with product managers having to spread themselves incredibly thin, doing more with less in many situations. Enter product operations, which is intended to help these critical folks scale. This book is a fantastic resource for those establishing product operations for the first time, those looking to understand how to leverage product operations (for those spread thin PMs) and for those who are already running product operations. Highly recommend having a copy in your library!

This book is such a gem!!! It’s a great resource that not only provides insightful analysis but also practical guidance that can be immediately applied to improve product operations. It’s the 2024 blueprint to setting up a top notch product operations team! This book has rapidly become my go-to recommendation for my peers in the industry.

Two thirds of the book cover the 3 pillars of product operations, which is great. But what makes the book for me is the remaining third of the book because it covers making the business case for product operations and how to implement it in the short and long term. Most books like this don’t spend time on “how.” This book does. Thank you, Melissa and Denise. I bet many other reads will appreciate the “how.”

Engrossed in Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles' work; finally a comprehensive guide to Product Operations. Their synthesis of scattered ProdOps wisdom into Pillar 3: Creating a Product Operating Model is brilliant. Treating processes like method thinking and running ops like an API, it's the playbook of playbooks for anyone navigating the intricate realm of internal digital products. A must-read for those aiming to rigorously version and gracefully deprecate processes and practices in the ever-evolving product landscape.

Fantastic book! Articulates the need for Product Ops as well as the functional aspect. A great read for anyone looking to mature their product organization.

Melissa and Denise illustrate product operations through a hands-on framework of three key pillars: 1️⃣ Data and Insight - Master the art of deriving quantitative insights and effectively linking them to business outcomes. 2️⃣ Customer and Market Insights - Learn how to aggregate insights about users and the market from various departments across your organization, including sales and customer success, as well as generating new insights. 3️⃣ Process and Governance - Discover the path to striking a balance between process orientation and result orientation. In addition to these pillars, Melissa and Denise offer practical examples and a detailed guide on how to implement these systems. I can highly recommend this book to all product leaders and managers aiming to build a more mature product organization.

Software product as a discipline is being forced to "grow up". Google, Meta and many others can no longer burn cheap cash chasing wild speculation. This means product leaders need to be more disciplined, organized, and data driven and this book provides an excellent frame work on how to get there. Thank you to the authors.

This is, as expected, a detailed and practical handbook for defining the purpose of your product operations practice and how to put it into effective practice. Denise and Melissa walk you through the problems Product Ops solves and how to structure your ProdOps team in a way that sets you up to succeed. I can't recommend this book highly enough. If you implement just one thing from here you'll 100x your investment in the book. It's a no brainer.

Just read the first chapters but the reading is very effective. Despite the quality of the print and the cover cutting is really poor for the book cost.

This was already a long-awaited book by the Product Operations community since Melissa Perri wrote a chapter on the topic in the “Outcome-Focused Communication” part of her iconic book Escaping the Build Trap. What I liked most about the book is the guiding thread of a hypothetical company (Pipeline 3k) that guides us through the problems and challenges faced by a Product Operations team. In addition to having cases from companies such as Amplitude, athenahealth, Fidelity, Oscar Health and Blake Samic, relying on his experience as current Head of Product Operations at OpenAI and former Global Head of Product Operations at Uber and Stripe. I think this is a must-read for anyone who wants to get closer to or already works in the Product Operations area. The book is a great guide to help you with product structuring challenges! In addition to bringing real cases and lessons learned from people in the area to connect around the world!