This is a continuing series of articles documenting, month by month, a full year of building a brand-new Product Operations function at HeliosX, a rapidly scaling, now £750m+ HealthTech. It is designed to show you the journey; it’s not a warts-and-all exposé.
I make no apologies that this focuses on the achievements, the methods and how we overcame challenges in a positive light, showing a practical journey with details to reuse and take away. It is still my job, after all!
This series is not an advertisement for the company, but is published with the blessing of HeliosX.
Read Month 9 here:
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Eagle-eyed regular readers will appreciate I'm fast coming up on a year now at HeliosX, coinciding…ish - with the need to be planning for 2026. A perfect time then to review the journey so far, and look ahead to what our most pressing needs are for the next few quarters.
FYI - my final edition of this 12-month check-in with you all will be a full-on reflection of this journey, so I will pick up on the look back then.
So what is in store for the rest of the year and into 2026, and how did we arrive at these decisions?
First, reflection.
Secondly, our capability self-assessment. Remember me talking about this in edition 7 and 8 of this series? This has been transformative in how we think about ourselves, how we operate and the culture we have currently - and therefore the areas we want to focus on.
I highly recommend this type of structured self-assessment for any leader, not just in product operations. It provides a focused framework for evaluating our team and uncovers patterns that have informed our long-term strategy. For us, the most prominent theme that emerged was culture.
Our self-assessment, supported by recent eNPS feedback, revealed that we don't have a significant cultural issue. Instead, the main concerns revolved around the regularity of changes in strategy and plans, and how this impacts day-to-day work.
This insight has become a central part of my Product Ops plan for the future. The strategy for the coming year is built around providing clarity, structure, and stability for our teams.
Further Enhancing Quarterly Planning
In response to feedback on strategic shifts, I’ve been further refining our quarterly planning process. The goal is to stretch out the planning period, making it less intense and allowing for earlier alignment across teams. So far, this has been successful in the teams we have piloted this with. Read up on the details of this in last month’s edition
Planning overall has long been something to improve within the teams and business overall, and with planning comes alignment and agreement, and (some degree of) commitment. I believe that this commitment will better help both our product teams and leadership become more resolute in the plans, the decisions, and result in fewer strategic changes, as much as is possible within the marketplace and economic climate we operate in. My aim is to empower product teams and provide a more stable foundation for everyone. We've had a great start, and in Q4, we will roll out this enhanced planning process to all squads.
Supporting Professional Development
A core part of this cultural initiative is ensuring that every team member feels supported in their professional development. We have, or will be, constructing a comprehensive set of resources, including a competency matrix, OKRs, personal development plans and review processes specific to our teams, and aligned with the overall company calendar. Every team member will have a clear understanding of their role, responsibilities, and the support systems available to them. Read about the competency matrix developed in Month 7 of this series:
This includes a new **onboarding program** specifically for product managers. This program will ensure that from day one, new hires understand our expectations, ways of working, and the support systems around them.
These initiatives aren't random; they are a direct result of our capabilities matrix, PM competency reviews, and valuable anecdotal feedback. They underscore the fact that Product Ops is not a quick fix but a long-term strategic investment.
Product Success Reporting and Forecasting
One of the most common challenges for product managers is consistently measuring the success of their features after launch. To address this, I’ve created a simple extension to our Airtable setup that connects our work with our financial planning and analysis team.
This tool allows us to record forecasted impact against the key metrics associated with each Initiative (typically revenue or cost reduction) and then track the actual, realised impact over time. This helps us spot trends and identify areas for improvement. I've also built several automations to streamline this process, making it a seamless part of our planning - for example when a new Initiative is created, the blank records for the forecasting weeks and months ahead (up to a year) are automatically created.
Helpdesk Improvements
We've made some progress with our helpdesk. A new virtual agent is now live, and with a 70% success rate for the users who have tried it (granted we have not advertised this much to date); it's already proving its value.
Additionally, we've launched a **re-education initiative** with our Customer Service (CS) team leads to standardise how our digital helpdesk is used. Given that our CS staff has more than doubled in the last year (to over 450), this training is crucial for setting clear expectations and ensuring everyone can get the support they need.
Standardising Jira
Oh Jira - ever my favourite tool to hate.
Jira has always been a complex beast, but I have FINALLY got around to standardising the configurations across our engineering teams. The interconnected nature of our Jira projects’ configuration often created conflicts when we needed to make changes. This initiative has untangled our projects and created a "gold standard" template for quickly spinning up new squad projects in the future.
While not a particularly complicated task, there were many moving pieces to coordinate, to think about (matching statuses where they have changed, updating boards, all while the teams are using the projects live). I was actually going to kick this off earlier in the month, but due to illness and various holidays, I needed my full attention over a period of time to ensure nothing was missed. So postponed to the end of August. But the long-term benefit is a more streamlined, agile, and scalable system that will support our growth for years to come.
Q3 Onsite Event
Finally, we're just a few weeks away from our Q3 onsite event. Based on feedback from our last gathering, we've made several improvements to the venue, agenda, and overall planning process.
Currently outstanding is what we do for an afternoon hands-on session - something vibe coding and/or something AI, more than likely, but we're getting there.
I’m excited for what is sure to be another great session, bringing the teams together to connect and collaborate, and planning has been much smoother that in Q2, with a structure to align with and much more time overall. A common theme of this edition - planning over a longer time is so much less stressful!
Graham
My thanks to HeliosX (obviously for employing me!) for blessing this continuing series, to my colleagues, and specifically to Joe Tarragano for his support on this.