The ultimate guide to product operations | Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles

**Melissa Perri** (0:00)
Do you want to hire 10,000 product managers and let them all do these things off the side of their desk and then concentrate on strategic work like 30% of the time? Or do you want them concentrating on strategic work majority of the time and then help build a product operations team around them that can create these shared systems and this infrastructure to allow them to work better?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:24)
Today, my guests are Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles. This is a rare two-guest episode. Melissa and Denise are authors of an awesome new book called Product Operations, How successful companies build better products at scale. Melissa is a legend in the product management community. She's the author of the foundational PM book, Escaping the Build Trap. She runs a product management training organization called Products Labs, teaches product management at Harvard, and has worked with hundreds of companies on their product management function. Denise is a product leader, coach and consultant, helping companies with their product vision, strategy, and execution, and works with Melissa at Products Labs. In our conversation, we get super deep into the emerging role of product ops. As you'll hear in our conversation, over the past few years, this role has gone from almost non-existent to something like half of scaling tech companies with at least one product ops person. This new role is probably the thing that's most changing in the role of product management, and after this conversation, I'm convinced it's a great thing. We chatted about what the role concretely is, how it differs from product management and project management, what to look for in your first product ops hire, how to roll out a product ops function, why product managers shouldn't be afraid of this role, and how your life gets significantly better, plus a case study on how they rolled out product ops function at a large company, and so much more. With that, I bring you Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles after a short word from our sponsor.
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Melissa and Denise, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
You are the second ever guest duo I've had on the podcast. Melissa, this is your second appearance on the podcast. And you two have a new book out, which I have right here. It's called Product Operations, How successful companies build better products at scale.
And what I want to do with our time today is to help people fully understand the role of product operations from every direction as much as we can get through in an hour. How does that sound?

**Melissa Perri** (3:44)
Sounds great.

**Denise Tilles** (3:45)
Great.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:45)
That's awesome.
So first question, just to set a little context on this role, how popular and how common is the role at this point? I did a quick skim of just awesome companies and really successful companies, and every single one of them seems to have a product ops role at this point. OpenAI, Uber, Stripe, Ramp, Deal. Those are just a few that I looked at. Is that what you're seeing? How should people think about how popular and how common this role has become?

**Melissa Perri** (4:12)
Yeah, I think over the last few years, we definitely have seen product operations start booming.
It did originate in a lot of big companies that you mentioned too, like Uber, the head of our product operations at Uber and the person who started it. Blake Samic is a case study in our book, and he also did it at Stripe and he does it at OpenAI. So it's pretty funny that you mentioned those three because that's Blake right there who did that.