Talking Roadmaps How does productops create the right environment for product work? | Chris Butler
Apr 25, 2025
Chris Butler, Staff Product Operations Manager at GitHub, shares his expertise in product management with a rich history at tech giants like Microsoft and Google. He explains design fiction as a tool to stimulate discussions about future ethical scenarios in product development. Chris emphasizes the crucial role of product operations in enhancing team environments and improving processes. He advocates for balancing execution with systemic improvements, while also sharing insights on automating tasks and measuring the impact of product ops on company culture.
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Design Fiction To Shape Future Work
- Chris Butler uses design fiction to surface future implications and values around technology.
- He described artifacts like a cereal box from Minority Report and an employee manual of the future to start productive conversations.
Product Ops Creates The Right Environment
- Product ops exists to continuously shape the environment where product managers work rather than only fixing crises.
- It focuses on enabling PM effectiveness across people, process, and tools instead of doing PMs' day-to-day tasks.
Treat Product Ops As Systems Work
- Do treat product ops as systems work: focus on people, process, and tools and resist reducing it to tooling alone.
- Avoid using product ops as mere stopgap doer work; instead evolve or remove processes that don't serve PMs.