5 key ingredients that make great product operations

Yifan Wang, Global Head of Operations at Firework, gave this presentation at the Product Operations Festival in May 2023.

Hi everyone, today I'm going to cover the topic of good product operations and great product operations. This is inspired by a very famous article called ‘Good Product Manager - Bad Product Manager,’ by A16Z.

This presentation is based on a lot of my personal experiences of building a team, developing different things, launching different products, and collaborating with many different functions.

Product operations at Firework

To give a quick introduction about myself, my name is Yifan Wang, and I’m currently the Global Head of Operations at Firework. I'm also one of the founding members of Firework.

Firework is a technology platform that provides shoppable short videos and shoppable live stream solutions to lots of different customers. We allow them to use shoppable short videos and live streams on their websites and their mobile apps.

Our customers include Walmart, Samsung, Levi’s, Gap, and different services like American Express and even Westfield. So you can have a lot of fun just by watching, engaging, and continuing to shop directly from their websites through quality entertainment experiences.

Firework has had a very interesting journey. It’s been running for six years now, so it’s still a very young startup.

We actually started with everything focused on B2C. We created an app and had a lot of users coming in. They started watching and browsing different kinds of content and continued to engage with that.

After a while, our business pivoted to a B2B focus and we changed our business model.

I've been focusing on global operations and managing and building a team around the globe. I’m very passionate about digital innovation, as well as creative strategy. I grew up in China and spent almost a decade in Hong Kong, so my areas of expertise also touch on a lot of FinTech and branding as well.

Today, I'm actually going to touch on a few things that I experience a lot day-to-day. I also see a lot of questions popping up in our community chat and Slack channels.

The areas I'm going to focus on are:

Mindset
Goal setting
Communication
And team growth

Let’s get started.

Adopting a startup founder’s mindset

When you introduce product operations, you always start with, “This is a new function.” Every company and industry has different purposes or setups in regard to product operations. This is extremely common.

All of us as good leaders start to look into how to bring this new function in. You might even be the first hire in it. You might be someone who doesn't know too much about the role, but you’ve been brought in and developed into this. You might be looking at how to connect things and help your function work together with other functions.

You might also do a lot of interviews to get started and understand many different kinds of issues and pain points from other teams. This is all really amazing, but let's think about how and what can take us to the next level.

To go to the next level, I’d like to challenge you to think about being a startup founder. Seeing things as a new function versus building your own startup, the mentality and the mindset may be very different. So when you’re building things from zero to one, this will help you to think about things differently.

I’ll give you a few examples. In a startup environment, we always talk about the concept of MVP. There are things you don't plan and work for and then look to develop into something excellent. You try them out first with something very, very rough and not exactly pretty.

But then you start to figure things out and see if they work, and then continue to iterate to the next level and the next stage. And that's basically a very important startup founder mentality.

Also, having a startup founder mentality is to really take ownership and responsibility, spending money as if it’s your own, and working on things as if it’s your business. This is what we mean about the startup founder's mindset and mentality.

From my experience, when we started the new function of product operations, one of the goals we wanted to achieve was to build a training platform that was good for both internal members and all of our customers.

As function leaders, what we decided was, “Okay, let's start to shop for learning platforms. Let's do research and find the right platform and start looking into this.”

But guess what? The budget was overwhelming. And also, because we were still conceptualizing this and initiating around it, it was too far away from what we wanted to look into.

This is where we went back to the drawing board and started to wear the founder’s hat. If we’re a startup founder, we’re trying to build something from scratch, and we want to start an MVP of the training program, so what would this look like?

So what we did is actually just use a Google Doc and create a framework to put everything together. I also started to create some of the materials like training videos, and then put it all into a place where it was easy to work.

And after this experience, we actually tried to do this with a tech partner, and we were able to launch our first certification program in a very short period of time.

This is actually a really great example of success, and we're confident that we can develop our own learning platform or launch any new platform with minimum risk based on all of the experiments and other things we’ve done.

So I suggest that all of us pay attention to this part of the mindset and continue to drive excellence to the next level.

Driving efficiency and effectiveness beyond day-to-day operations

In product operations, we come into a lot of different situations. Your day-to-day will probably be about putting out fires and trying to save and juggle many different things.

A lot of you might jump into the KPIs because you want to see success immediately. This is great, but if you want to achieve on the next level, make sure you save some time to look into the bigger picture.

This is where I think operations should be able to measure everything and set a long-term vision and goal for your team and your company.

This is also where I'm sure a lot of you will come to question the OKRs. In fact, we do have a lot of discussions in the Slack channel around OKRs, how to set up the right measurements, and how to do this in the best ways.

I suggest that all of us look into efficiency and effectiveness. In product operations, you might hear all of these words like ‘assist’, ‘help’, ‘support’, ‘consult’, or ‘participate.’ These are all really good effort activities, but they aren’t effective measurements of your end result.

You might want to adopt different ways to think about how to do this. For example, if you assist with something, how do you measure that assistance?

In my team, there are several ways we actually measure all of our efforts. For a lot of the regular tasks around launch training and ongoing support, we basically measure by the efforts we're putting in, like the time that we spend, the growth that we're achieving, the number of webinars, and the number of hours of training we do.

You could even do a wider measurement around your NPS score, or your review and feedback from other teams who are involved in the process to help with this. This could be really interesting.

Another very important measure is while we’re working on or optimizing any of the new processes, we're expanding the existing workflow. We need to measure by adoption. Either it’s 100% adoption rate, or let’s say we're able to launch this within a certain time with a certain number of customers. Or we’re able to launch this in this region, and then consider other regions for the second launch phase.

So all of these will be good ways to consider your measurement around anything around processes.

Last but not least, I also want to mention the MVP efforts. There will be a lot of innovation approaches, and even trying to do some new initiatives. So if you want to focus on zero to one, you might want to use an MVP way to measure that as well. So make something very simple and small and continue to develop from this.

And this is also where you want to adjust your goals. Sometimes a quarter may be too long for you for this MVP process, so you can continue to develop by looking to six weeks or four weeks, and that's completely fine.

For our team, and specifically for product operations, there are times when we actually look into a month-by-month perspective on the OKR. It's actually really helpful because there are a lot of nuances and a lot of things we’re still trying to adjust.

So hopefully this will inspire all of you to think about how to drive efficiency and effectiveness beyond the day-to-day, and look at the bigger picture.

Product users aren’t your only customers

As part of operations, we always focus on product. It’s literally in the function name. A lot of the operations are around the product, developing the processes, and trying to drive excellence around the product. So a lot of the time we’re really really focused on the product.

But here, I want to ask everyone to take a step back. What is important for product? What should the product focus be?

Product will actually focus on the customer. Knowing what the customers need and knowing their pain points is really, really important for the product. But most important is knowing the ‘why’ from the customers. This is where you can actually develop the best solution for them.

Sometimes customers say, “Hey, I want my horse to run faster.” They aren’t saying they want a car, but knowing that the customer really wants to arrive at their destination in a shorter period of time can help you identify what the best solution is from there.

It's the same for us in product operations. We should also focus on the customers because customers will point back to our solutions. But for product operations, it’s not just about the product users. For the product you develop, you might have different types of users. This is great to understand what they want and the things they're focused on.

Your process users might be the PMs, the QA team, the engineering team, the marketing team, and the customer success team. They’re all your customers as well.

We need to know the customers and know what they're thinking, what their pain points are, and what other things can help them do better and better. So this is where we can identify how to improve things.

In a certain period of time, for any of the product launches, there are certain challenges we're facing. Certain teams have certain feedback and opinions on the launch.

After talking to our customers, as in all of these process users, we realized what they actually wanted was to have an opportunity to try our product out before it launched, and so they could develop something relevant to the product excellence.

Based on this, we actually launched a program that allowed any of the internal team members to have a voice and try things out before the official launch, and also provide early-stage feedback, which is extremely beneficial to all of our teams.

So this program is actually based on the customer's feedback. This is something you can also try. Beyond the PMs, there are many different customers you could look into.

The importance of overcommunicating

Communication is very important for our operations. We connect with so many different functions and work with so many different stakeholders.

I'm sure everybody has so many different meetings and gets a lot of updates, no matter if you're using Slack messages, emails, newsletters, videos, or live streams. There are so many different formats to help everyone understand what's going on.

It's all really awesome, but I'm sure we all face the challenge of making sure that communication is really effective, and how we can make sure the communication between different teams and different stakeholders, specifically on certain topics, is better and faster.

This is where I want to talk about how we can make sure we focus on alignment and overcommunication. I see a lot of questions asking, “What are the best tools I can use to help each of the teams sync up on certain things? What are some of the tools that you use to talk to executives or management teams? What are the tools for doing this or doing that?”

Our tools are amazing, but the tools are designed for a reason. If we don't understand the reasons behind different teams to make certain decisions, we can’t move forward.

My mentor mentioned this book and approach to me from Simon Sinek that’s really, really good. The approach is called ‘Start With Why.’ I highly recommend looking into this, as it helps with a lot of communication and makes it easy to align with different teams.

When you’re talking to different teams and trying to align on different schedules and different approaches, you might receive a lot of rejection, like “No, this isn’t working for me.” But if you try to start with ‘why’ and explain the reason, this could be really, really helpful.

Statistics show that you need to communicate seven times for people to remember your message. Seven times. It's not easy to reach that specifically. We also do a lot of hybrid and remote working together now, where it’s very easy to drown in the information ocean. So in order to make sure your message is delivered clearly, overcommunicate.

So after running product operations for a couple of months, we realized that a lot of people still didn't understand the vision or what exactly the team was doing. We don't blame them because there are so many meetings and so many different communication channels.

So we started a new approach in the last quarter. At every product training meeting and every time we host something together with a larger group, we’ll always start with the team introduction. What is the product operations team? What do we do? Who are some of the key members?

We even communicate our roadmap to everyone during all of these meetings and explain how things are going, and what things we're focused on. So this is actually really helpful for everyone to understand clearly.

So I highly recommend this if you’re still struggling to plug in or still launching your product operations function.

Speaking of communication, communication with your peers and your other function teams is very important. I receive a lot of questions about how to talk to the management team and how to make sure your senior leadership team is really aware of the work that you do.

I’m part of the senior leadership team, and a lot of times when my team's coming to me, they’re underprepared. So here are some of my tips that can help you to prepare better.

There are two types of senior leaders that might exist in the organization. One type is a little bit reactive. Especially in big organizations, they have so many different things they need to look into and so many different functions to handle.

When working with slightly more reactive leaders, the first thing that pops up into their minds when talking to you might be, “Okay, what's next?” People always ask what's next. And then, “What do I need to do? Do you need some support? Or is everything going well?”

Understanding this will help you to shape your communication better with the management. You might want to start with the summary, how are things going, and tell them either a few reasons we're doing well, or a few reasons we’re not doing well, and then provide a conclusion of the support, resources, feedback, or advice you need from them.

While a lot of the leaders might be very proactive, they might need certain check-ins, and they might want to go a little bit deeper into the things you're working on. You can also prepare your development roadmaps on a higher level, or even create certain dashboards with instant updates for them to look at.

But again, everything will all come back to the measurement and the metrics as well. Provide very high-level, easy-to-recognize metrics for your senior leadership to look into.

That’s why with OKRs, sometimes we just use three colors to represent what everything looks like, and this will be very simple and easy, even for a management team, to know how things are going right now.

Your leader hired you because they trust you. They trust your expertise and your learning capabilities, so don't worry too much about having to present everything to them. They won't expect that. So focus on the high level, present your thoughts, and also provide some follow-ups for your management team as well.

Develop within and beyond

Last but not least, I wanted to talk a little bit about education and training. I've been asking around, “What's the best job description? What are some of the most important capabilities we need to look into?”

Even in some of the early stages with a lot of team planning, I saw so many members plan it very well with things like, “I need an analyst, I need an agile coach or a trainer, I need this and that.”

This is really, really awesome, but I also want to encourage everyone to develop within and beyond. Sometimes, looking into a talent, the capability of learning, and the mindset are actually more important than skills.

A lot of you are probably not native product operations members. You might come in from a program management background or a product background. You come in from so many different backgrounds. What brought you where you are today is your capability of learning and developing.

So when you're looking into building and growing your team, that's something that’s very important.

Most of my team hasn't done any specific product operations work, but they have done something similar or relevant. But most importantly, they’re open to learning and developing.

I think forums, communities, and webinars are very helpful because there’s no textbook. There’s nothing set in place for all of us to say what the concrete and specific way for product operations to continue to develop is. But we’re here to refine and develop this together.

It’s not only important to train your team, but it’s also important to develop and train everyone in your company so they understand more about product operations and everything that you do. The more they know, the better they can align with you as well.

Not everybody has the operations mindset. If we want to develop excellence around the product, we actually need to plan ahead. There are so many details about how to launch things, what some of the action items are, what the best practices are, some of the things users might encounter, etc. These all tie into the operations.

Certain PMs, engineers, and teams might not be very familiar with this. It’s completely fine because we all speak different languages based on our position, but this is where by sharing your language and your expertise, more and more members will understand what things look like.

You also need to train your management team as well. I’m not kidding. There are leaders who are foreign to the concept of product operations because it hasn’t existed for long. There are still knowledge gaps, inspiration, and innovations we can bring into the organization, and that you can talk to your leadership about as well.

So make sure you also spend time to let them know what product operations is, what some of the problems are that we're trying to solve, and what things we're trying to work together on.

Conclusion

Adopt an entrepreneur mindset, set really ambitious and long-term goals, put customers in the center, and figure out the ways to measure.

Always align and foster a culture of open communication and collaboration. Also, invest in the development of your team and your company, and think beyond. This will help take product operations to the next level and achieve great things.

Remember, good product operations is focused on getting the job done, getting through the day-to-day, and finishing all the tasks. But great product operations is about achieving exceptional results and making a real impact.

These are just five areas in my day-to-day and my experience that I think are really important to continue to drive growth and innovation within the organization.

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