Product Ops People Podcast

In this episode, I talk with Chris Butler, Global Head of Product Operations @ Cognizant, about the value of good decision making and how we can train this skill within the product team in low cost and safe ways. Chris Butler is a chaotic good product manager, writer, and speaker. He facilitates critical decision making for teams that build new and innovative products. Chris focuses on bias, uncertainty, and randomization to help build robust and resilient teams. He has over 20 years of product management leadership at Microsoft, Waze, KAYAK, aand Facebook Reality Labs. He is now Assistant Vice President, Head of Product Operations, at Cognizant where he PM's the PM experience.

This is a special episode recorded at the Product Excellence Summit where I hosted a panel about "Building & Scaling a Product Operations Team" at Productboard's Product Excellence Summit. We had some great insights from Anabela Cesário from OutSystems,  Jodi Alperstein from Segment Srinivas Somayajula from Calendly. It is an excellent discussion on how this function ensures that the product team can function smoothly, support the product team to move faster and focus on customer needs in a more consistent fashion.

In this episode, I talk with Becky Flint, CEO at Dragonboat, about the recent conversation of if Product Ops is a force of good or bad in developing an excellent product function. Hint, its not a simple answer :). Becky Flint is the founder and CEO of Dragonboat, the product portfolio platform for outcome driven product ops and product teams.  Prior to starting Dragonboat, Becky has built and scaled product operations and product portfolios for fast growing companies like PayPal, Shutterfly, Bigcommerce and Feedzai, when they were pre-unicorns or early unicorns. In addition to leading Dragonboat, Becky is a big champion for women in tech and outcome driven product practice. She is the founder of ResponsivePPM.org and outcome focused product HQ Slack community for product ops and product leaders.

Hugo Froes, Product Operations Principal at Farfetch, joins me to talk about what it is like starting a Product Ops function. We discuss how treating your work like any other product can improve your success and hone your skills. With over 20 years in the field of product and design, Hugo has explored user centered methodologies applied to product development (ex. UX, Design Thinking, Service Design and Lean UX). His main focus is helping teams reach their full potential to build better products. As a teacher in various institutions, a co-founder of UXDiscuss and board member of the Global ResearchOps community, he strives to also contribute to the community and help shape young minds towards user centered methodologies.  He loves solving problems and spending time with family, reading a book, listening to some tunes or watching a movie.

Rhiannon Gaskell, Director Delivery and Product Ops at Culture Amp, joins me to talk about how to organise delivery so your product teams can focus on discovering customer problems while still being connected to delivery. Rhiannon is a product leader with over 10 years of experience in delivery and product management related roles and has previously been part of teams at Australia Post, Carsales and Message Media.

Brian Swift, Head of Product at Dovetail, joins me to talk about how to integrate a space for research into the Product Ops model. We discuss how to encourage a research culture with open repositories that helps bring customers into product decisions. Brian is a product leader with over 10 years experience in product management and strategy. He is currently the Head of Product at Dovetail, and has previously been part of product teams at SafetyCulture, Atlassian, Twitter and Zynga, among others. Brian has helped build products like Dovetail, iAuditor, Confluence, Fabric, Crashlytics and FarmVille. You can find more at https://dovetailapp.com/blog/

Denise Tilles, CPO at Grocket, joins me to talk about the emergence of Product Ops from her experience in a wealth of environments across fintech, healthcare, finance and many others where she advises on how to embed a great Product Ops function. Denise has over 10 years of product leadership experience working with startup, growth stage, and enterprise organisations to transform opportunity into a crisp product vision, strategy, and building the org to enable execution.You can find Denise at at denisetilles.com

Jasper Streit, Product Director at Elmo joins me to talk about the difference in organising product in the enterprise environment versus a scale up. We talk about the different product skills that need to be weighted and how being transparent can help grow your team. Having performed product roles in companies ranging from early startups of 2-3 employees to behemoth enterprises of 40k employees - across a number of industries, Jasper helps us navigate these differences. 

Brad Dunn is the Chief Product Officer at Whispir (ASX:WSP), a communications intelligence company. Before that, he was CEO of Nazori, a product development business in Melbourne. Brad joins me to talk about the expectations of Product in the executive space and how Product Ops contributes to being able to organise product development at all levels. Brad also shares about his team's exciting work in the field of Product Intelligence. Brad writes on Medium at https://jesterhoax.medium.com REEsQrIkZyfDsNnTu2MX

Welcome to Product Ops People. Join me Simon Hilton as I talk with Product Leaders around the world about how Product Ops is growing and uniting product led companies.