Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo)

**Christine Itwaru** (0:00)
Speaking as a former PM, I would not ever give up spending time with customers and watching their pain.
That's how I fell in love with product, was I saw my internal customer 12 years back now, fighting with the keyboard, fighting with the mouse. And I was just like, oh my gosh, what's this guy doing?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:23)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Christine Itwaru. Christine is a long-time product ops leader at Pendo, a role that she transitioned into from product management. I've been hearing more and more about the rise of product ops, and I've never really understood what the role was until I had this conversation with Christine. We dig into what product ops people do day to day, where the line is between their role and product management, whether you should consider getting into the role, whether your company would benefit from product ops. We also have an interesting discussion around whether ops roles in general are a sign of inefficiency at your company. I learned a ton from this conversation and Christine is awesome. And so with that, I bring you Christine Itwaru after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.
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Christine, welcome to the podcast.

**Christine Itwaru** (2:37)
Thank you, I'm so happy to be here Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:39)
First of all, I just wanted to give a big thank you to Ben Williams, who was a previous guest on this podcast, who suggested you join this podcast and who connected us.
And we were chatting earlier and you said you have a story about Ben. And so what is that?

**Christine Itwaru** (2:51)
I do. Absolute thanks to Ben for connecting us.
So when he made the intro, I was super excited, one, because it's you, and two, because I love hearing from Ben. And I was like, oh, great, he's doing all these wonderful things and whatnot. And I just remember in that moment, my first conversation with Ben, which was really early in the days of starting product operations at Pendo.
And we were going through all these just really crazy things that he was going through in his team as a customer at Pendo at the time. And he's like sitting there just kind of staring and just, I was like, oh, you're okay.
I thought that I was just throwing him off at every turn. And he said to me, you know, I bet you I'm not the only person who has these questions. And I bet you I'm not the only person that's thinking about all these problems that probably seem very normal and natural. I don't know. I bet all of us are going through this. This is why I'm building product ops here.
But when he said it, he was just like, I really think there are a lot more people that you need to talk to about this stuff. So, and I was just so, you know, it's just kind of full circle, right? I think he connected us and he was one of the reasons I started to say one of the best things that my first Boston product always told me was, you have to find a way to get back. And when he said that to me, I was like, I wonder if this is one of the ways that I can start to get back to the product.