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 10 here:
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In this penultimate edition of the series, Product Ops at HeliosX has been more mindful and aware than ever before of changes and demands around it, reacting to the needs of the teams and wider business for the greater good. Product Ops is not just about ever pushing pushing pushing forward, but adapting the transformation plan to the realities of life, of others, and of the business, even if that adaptation is to slow down or even stop on some initiatives. As we explore in this September update.
Market shifts
Followers of the news in the summer of 2025 will have noted the weight-loss medication market was shaken up with significant prices increases from suppliers, which within my organisation (if you remember, an online pharmacy and the largest supplier of the popular weight-loss medication in Europe) led to a protracted period of refocus to ensure customers were supported, informed and had the tools available to them to make the correct decisions on their medication.
PR talk over, our product teams (and indeed significant parts of the business) shifted plans at comparatively short notice, with new requirements coming quickly and at the peak of Q4 planning. Coordination was well executed, but there was a lot to do very quickly - there was just a lot going on.
Not for the first time in this series, it was important to recognise the business needs at this time - to allow the product teams space and time, empathy and flexibility to do what needs to be done, even if not fully following the guidelines, getting reports in on time, and pausing on some rollout plans Product Operations had.
Product Operations will create and execute on transformation plans, plans similar to how product management operates. But so importantly, just like product management, those plans need to be agile to changing customer needs. And at this time, my customers - predominantly product managers - needed that space and to pause several other transformation phases. I cannot stress how important this is, and recognise this is not always as simple as it sounds...
I will take this opportunity to praise everyone within the product and tech teams involved in any aspect of the work executed (and indeed anyone within the business overall). It was a challenge - and I was only on the outside looking in on much of this!
Offsite feedback
Back to our regular show... time to check in on the Q3 Digital R&D division Offsite day. You can read more about the lead-up to this in the previous months’ update here:
Overall, both planning and execution were smooth, the content was well received, and the day provided value to attendees. Feedback requested immediately after largely reflected this.
I once again acted as host, compere and occasionally school teacher in ‘encouraging’ some staff to focus on the day and not what else was going on in the world at the time.
We kicked off with a customary leadership update and review, followed by the first of two revamped lightning talk sessions. These were popular before and indeed were again this time - with fewer slots but more time for each to interact with questions from the audience. These are excellent ways to provide opportunities for staff to speak to a larger (around 100) audience and gain that experience. Sure, not everyone was super slick or confident, but the audience was primed to be friendly and supportive. I may be comfortable getting up and chatting about anything to anyone, but that can absolutely be taken for granted when it comes to others.
A leadership AMA was then run, which we had to call time on due to the number of questions - starting with pre-canned before opening up to a now-warmed audience. Interestingly, this session, when being planned was called out by a colleague as to its relevance, in that we should be anticipating and answering such questions before they are asked, but being close to our teams. While I can see the ambition and ideal here, the Q&A is more than just providing the answers, but about engaging with the team members, particularly as we continue to grow, and leadership levels have the potential to become disconnected from the ICs.
The afternoon sessions were then department and squad-specific - giving the groups time to connect IRL that they may not otherwise have many opportunities to do, and specific sessions dedicated to the needs of product management, design and engineering.
Our next event is in the Spring, where we’ll continue to improve.
Quarterly Planning v1 - Feedback
Now, at the end of Q3, we have completed the first iteration of the new quarterly planning timeline (see HERE). I have been very pleased with its execution and the impact it has had.
Our teams felt the extended timescale of planning gave them more opportunity to engage with teams, with leaders, and with stakeholders, and having the checkpoints throughout the process gave good opportunities for feedback. This engagement and refinement - and having decent time to do this - was one of the critical outcomes to achieve with this project and a key issue we - and many organisations - have with our planning process.
Admittedly, some shortcomings were felt in clearer expectations on what the audiences in checkpoints and reviews wanted to see, and how they wanted to see it, and has been a good targeted improvement area for the next cycle (kicking off right now at the time of writing!). Our CEO is involved in reviews of the roadmaps and planning, and the feedback from him has been much the same - a stepped improvement with some refinement on the details - and providing more of the details - still to come.
What has been clear is the importance of engagement with stakeholders and decision makers within the business - not just to refine and align on what is to be produced, but also to gain agreement, support and trust from those same stakeholders, who will then go on to influence and decide on the grander plans. It is no secret that this is just another part of the process of gaining that trust, to ultimately use that trust to allow greater autonomy to the product managers with somewhat less detailed oversight. The trust is certainly growing, but we now need to continue to show more detail before we begin to show less.
Business-wide OKR management tool using Airtable
A project that has been in the works for a little while now is to provide a more centralised, more robust way to record and manage our business-wide plans and objectives - OKRs at a stretch. Not only has this been fragmented across the business in terms of how and to what level of detail, but the ability to usefully share, report on, and monitor progress of these plans has been difficult, if not impossible, in some cases.
I certainly knew this could be done in a better way and approached our Director of Strategy to discuss - and happily, he and his team also felt the same, and indeed have the embers of a plan in motion (more on the principle rather than the mechanism). And so enter my favourite platform, my new baby, Airtable. And unlike perhaps some projects creatively being executed in this tool, a business-wide OKR management tool (I shall call him BOMT) is perfectly suited to a no-code database and app tool.
At the time of writing, I’ve architected the database (a fairly simple hierarchical set of tables linking goals to objectives to several more layers down through the business layers, and some shared context and updated tabled across these), built some shared datasets (a shared database for staff and teams that is now reused for other projects in the business) and constructed some base interfaces. These interfaces, friendly ways to interact with the data, will be used by the majority of the business leadership to manage the OKRs as this rolls out, so this is critical to the success of the project to get right.
Scope is creeping sure, but just this week, we few on the project agreed: “We’re designing the plan while we are in the air” - and yes, this is Product Operations as well through and through! Read more about this analogy:
What’s next: aside from more scope creep based on learning what more we can achieve with the platform, further understanding of our end-user needs - all usual product management stuff... the focus will turn to reporting and pushing the right information to the right stakeholders in the business. For example, show key leaders which of their sponsored objectives are behind, and what contributing projects (which could be several layers down in the business) are responsible for this and by how much - immediately and on-demand - but without necessarily having to know every detail of every contributing project themselves which is often not practical in scaling and large businesses. This sort of thing will be achieved through the architecture and through the use of AI agents working within the system.
Additionally, and key to success, is enabling and hooking up each division in the business to this central solution. This is training key staffon how to use the solution, this is training divisions on how to use Airtable for their own solutions, and then linking any solutions they have, they wish to build (or likely will have to build) up to the central system to allow for more automation and AI use in reporting, and greater efficiency.
I will be speaking about our implementation of no-code, AI-enabled solutions at the PLA Product Ops Summit in London, in December (Link here)
Just a side note on our evolution of Airtable - we are now on the top level subscription to take advantage of some needed tools, one being to sync multiple databases into a central one, and the other being much greater user, group and security controls than in previous tiers - which has also allowed me/forced me to undertake a significant review of how has access to what (within Airtable) through our informal use of the platform to date. I will admit there are some shortcomings in the management of users, but it also highlights the importance of such a review as your business scales from that informal use to a much more professional use.
Next month... 1 year
Next month will see the final edition of this 0:1 series (of course, not the end of all articles and resources from this newsletter!), and I will be reflecting on the past 12 months, the transformation we see from then to now, and what the future looks like for Product Ops at HeliosX.
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.