If You Don't Have a Product Ops Strategy, Your Job Is Already at Risk
But It's Not Too Late to Fix It
Last month, I gave the closing keynote at Design Ops London.
The talk was about operational disciplines - Product Ops, Design Ops, you name it - and the single thing that determines whether they survive and thrive inside an organisation, or get deprioritised and then laid off when budgets tighten. My argument was blunt: if you are in an operational role and you cannot articulate a clear, defensible strategy within your first three months, you should not be surprised if you fail your probation. And it would be with good reason, too.
The talk landed. People were nodding, taking photos of my slides, coming up to me afterwards - it was great. But there was one exchange I hadn’t predicted, and it’s one I still think about, even a month later.
One of the people I spoke to after my talk was a Design Ops Lead I know and respect. She’s smart, experienced, and clearly excellent at her job. She told me she’d really enjoyed the talk - great! - but then she also said the following:
“It made me kinda nervous. Because I realised I’m not doing any of the things you said I should be doing.”
I’ve been thinking about that sentence ever since.
Now, I know that this isn’t an uncommon problem. I see this in conversations with my coachees all the time. Being a strategic operator is a genuinely difficult thing to pull off, and it’s the single biggest issue in any transformation work.
But until she said it so openly I never really realised just how little accessible guidance is out there.
The Trap Is Structural, Not Personal
Here is what I have observed, consistently, across years of working with product organisations: the people who end up in operational roles are almost always exceptional at spotting problems. They walk into a room and within weeks they have a complete picture of everything that is broken, inefficient, misaligned, or missing.
This is exactly why they get hired. And in a cruel twist of fate, it is also exactly why they get stuck.
Because organisations don’t hire operational leads and then give them six months to think. They hire them and immediately point them at the nearest fire. Prove your worth. Deliver value. Show us this was the right call.
So they dive in. They fix things. They are busy - genuinely, productively busy. And six months later, they come up for air and realise they have been firefighting since day one, with no clear sense of where they were going or how to explain why any of it mattered.
Most of the time, this is not a personal failure - It’s a structural one. The organisation created the conditions for it, and nobody pushed back.
But here is the uncomfortable truth: Your organisation will not save you from it either. When budgets tighten and headcount gets scrutinised, “I’ve been very busy solving problems” will not be a defensible enough position. A list of problems solved is not a strategy. And without a strategy, you cannot demonstrate impact at the level that’s necessary to protect your role.
What Happens Without a Strategy
I want to be specific about the risk here, because I think it gets largely underestimated.
Without a strategy, your priorities are set by whoever shouts loudest. You are reactive by default, which means your work is only ever as visible as the last fire you put out. You have no framework for saying no, so you say yes to everything, spread yourself thin, and deliver nothing at the depth that creates lasting change.
Without a strategy, you cannot build buy-in. You cannot walk into a conversation with your CPO and explain, with confidence, why you are working on what you are working on, what it will produce, and how you will know it worked. You are always one reorg away from being the first team cut.
And without a strategy, Product Operations never gets to do what it is actually capable of. The function exists to multiply the effectiveness of the product organisation around it. That is a significant, strategic mandate. Firefighting wastes it - and gives it a bad rap, too.
Why Strategy Is Not a Luxury
I hear a version of the same two objections regularly: “I’d love to be more strategic, but I just don’t have time - there’s too much to do.”
I understand why it feels that way. I’ve been there. But I also know it’s backwards.
The reason there is too much to do is because there is no strategy to filter it through. Strategy is not something you do after you’ve cleared the backlog. Newsflash: The backlog never clears. Strategy is what tells you which parts of the backlog actually matter.
The other objection I hear: “I’d love to be more strategic, but I don’t even know where to start.”
This one I have more sympathy for, because strategic thinking is genuinely hard. It requires zooming out in a way that feels uncomfortable - especially when you are surrounded by things that need fixing RIGHT NOW.
I feel that discomfort in my belly. I feel it every time I coach someone new, every time I start a new consulting engagement, every time I hear or read or see yet another sharp, capable operator stuck in the same tactical loop who I know can do better.
And quite frankly I’ve had enough.
The Product Operations Strategy Playbook
In the past few years I’ve solved the strategy problem for myself - but I want to go beyond that. So I’ve codified exactly how I approach Product Ops strategy - every conversation you need to have, every question you need to answer, every artefact you need to create - into a playbook you can download for free.
It is not a quick fix. Done properly, the full process will take you six to eight weeks. It requires conversations with senior leadership, an honest assessment of your current state, and the discipline to translate all of that into a roadmap you can actually defend.
But by the end of it, you will have something most Product Ops practitioners never build: a clear direction, explicit alignment with leadership, and a strategy you can point to when someone asks why you are doing what you are doing.
Download it below. Use it, share it, adapt it to your context. Make it yours.
Your organisation needs you to operate at this level. So does the discipline.
And I know that you are capable of it.
