3 Key Functions of Product Operations During Product Planning

49% of companies don’t use a consistent product management process (Productside). That lack of process consistency brings chaos into product planning. Of course, those internal challenges have an external impact. One in five products being delivered fail to meet customer needs (Productside). Product operations teams have the unique skills to operationalize, centralize, and scale that can add value across organizations. 

What is product planning? 

Product planning is a process that decides the product direction and execution plan in conjunction with wider business goals for a set period of time. It sounds simple in a sentence, but as product operations teams know, the actual product planning process is complex. Feedback comes from all angles. Voices in the room push requests without data. Company goals feel far removed from the day-to-day product work. That’s where product operations comes in.

The key functions of product operations in the product planning process

“Product operations for me is about concentrating efforts––giving product managers and engineers back their time to do high-priority work by centralizing intake, prioritization, communications, and roadmapping.” – Shelly La Rock, Head of Product Operations and Delivery Excellence at Autodesk

Shelly La Rock is the Head of Product Operations and Delivery Excellence at Autodesk, where she optimizes product development and delivery across the company’s extensive product portfolio. With a rich background in product operations, she previously served as a product leader at Sauce Labs and NAVEX Global, driving operational efficiency and alignment. Shelly was also named the 2024 Product Operations Leader of the Year by the Product-Led Alliance.

In her recent fireside session at our Product Excellence Summit, Shelly shared three key functions of product operations teams when it comes to driving effective strategic planning: 

• Breaking down team silos by centralizing customer insights
• Using data to align stakeholders during and after product planning
• Helping stakeholders connect to the broader vision by tying the roadmap to OKRs and business goals

Executing a product plan

Translating the goals you’ve set into tactical action can be challenging, especially when faced with everyday uncertainty.

1. Breaking down team silos by centralizing customer insights

As organizations scale, more and more feedback comes from an increasing number of channels. Product managers are often left to sort through all of that customer feedback on their own. Product operations teams help take that lift off of product managers so they can focus on strategic decision-making and user research. 

“We had requests coming in through dozens of different channels. Our product managers were having to collect, sort, and group them, and then respond back out through those individual channels. A single source of truth for us was a critical need to be able to scale our product management efforts and enable our go-to-market teams.”  – Shelly La Rock, Head of Product Operations and Delivery Excellence, Autodesk

From there, it’s the product operations team’s job to streamline and facilitate regular request reviews. 

“We also developed a cadence and framework for weekly backlog reviews with the stakeholder teams that allow us to see our cross-domain dependencies. We have all of those stakeholders in the room, looking at the same list of features.”  – Shelly La Rock, Head of Product Operations and Delivery Excellence, Autodesk

Helping stakeholders stay close to the voice of the user through regular request reviews and digestible insights ensures that work drives impact for users and the business while not getting stuck in team silos. 

2. Using data to align stakeholders during and after product planning

Because product is at the heart of a business, product as a function often takes input and juggles ideas coming from many voices––users, sales, engineering, marketing, leadership, you name it. Responding with clear reasoning that stakeholders can align with can be tricky. Having data to support your decisions is key, especially when it comes to aggregating customer feedback and allocating resources. 

“We’re able to now see data on all things in one place, which allows us to not just build roadmaps, but also look at capacity. We can see data from Jira, like story pointing and the number of developers on each scrum team, in Productboard. 

We can say, ‘We have capacity for five things this quarter, but we have six requests,’ and we’re able to size them and communicate to our stakeholder teams. Decisions are made faster.”  – Shelly La Rock, Head of Product Operations and Delivery Excellence, Autodesk

3. Helping stakeholders connect to the broader vision by tying the roadmap to OKRs

“We’re tracking our large scale enterprise programs, our initiatives. We’re laddering all of those up to corporate objectives, to OKRs.” – Shelly La Rock, Head of Product Operations and Delivery Excellence, Autodesk

Ensuring your product planning and subsequent roadmap tie to OKRs and business objectives increases your likelihood to build in the right direction. Furthermore, when faced with unexpected requests you’re able to then assess priority and impact more quickly and clearly. Key to this is creating a central hub detailing out the connection between the product plan and business objectives that anyone across the organization can access. 

Product planning checklist for product operations

From all of Shelly’s insights, the actions product operations teams need to take for an effective product planning cycle are clear:

1. Tie your product plan and roadmap to OKRs and business goals
2. Communicate the connection between your product strategy and business objectives (ideally documented in a way that’s accessible across the business)
3. Establish a hub and center of truth for all customer feedback and insights
4. Use trends and customer evidence to support key elements in the product plan
5. Set up recurring request reviews to identify cross-domain dependencies
6. Assess new requests according to their fit to your documented product plan and how they would further business goals

Product operations drives value across the entire organization

Product operations might be small (and growing), but it’s a mighty function with an opportunity to drive value across the organization in support of product teams. 

That opportunity becomes increasingly critical during the product planning process, where product operations  can save product teams countless hours through: 

• Unified customer feedback systems
• Data-driven stakeholder communications
• A clear product plan that ties to company objectives and OKRs

Most importantly, these functions also ensure product teams are aligned with stakeholders, adding value at the business-level, and building the right products and features for their users. 

“That’s why I love the work I do. It’s seeing our product teams accomplish from a bi-weekly conversation what they previously couldn’t in a month. – Shelly La Rock, Head of Product Operations and Delivery Excellence, Autodesk

To hear more from Shelly on how to go from planning to execution, attend the webinar, From Plans to Progress: How Autodesk Executes Annual Planning at Scale, on December 12th.

Register now