Looking Back to Look Ahead

Three Years of the Product Operations Manifesto

Three years and one day ago, on the 26th April 2023, the Product Operations Manifesto was released into the world.

A lot has happened in those three years. And somehow, it feels both very long and very short at the same time. Long enough that the discipline has changed and evolved since we published. Short enough that I can remember exactly where I was sitting when the website went live.

Every so often I get asked whether the Manifesto ought to be iterated on. Whether the content still holds true so much later. Whether a Manifesto is even still necessary.

I don’t claim to have all the answers - but for today, let’s explore together what the last 36 months have meant for our discipline.

Why the Manifesto exists

The Manifesto was born out of frustration - specifically mine, but also that of every Product Ops practitioner I had spoken to up to that point.

I had just come out of one of the hardest professional experiences of my career. I had joined a company as their Head of Operations for Product and Engineering, and spent six months fighting for my seat at the table. I relentlessly advocated for my role, tried my hardest to justify my existence to my leadership peers, delivered every quick win I could think of while navigating internal politics, a broken roadmap, and looming layoffs everyone knew were coming.

Six months later, despite my best intentions, I was let go.

I’d like to tell you that this was unusual. But the more Product Ops people I spoke to, the more I realised it wasn’t. The details varied - some stories were bleaker, some more benign - but the throughline was the same. We were all spending enormous amounts of energy on the meta-work of being allowed to be full-time Product Ops practitioners in public: explaining what we did, why we were there, and what we needed to actually do it.

What I wanted - what I wish I had had - was an artefact. Something I could point to. Something I could hand to someone and say: this is what I do, this is why I do it, and this is what I need to be successful. Not as a way of winning an argument, but as a way of starting a conversation on a level playing field.

But such an artefact didn’t exist.

So I decided to create one.

Then and Now

The Manifesto was co-created by twelve Product Ops practitioners, entirely asynchronously, in twenty-two days. Deliberately done on a tight schedule, I wanted everyone involved to part with their opinions fast - so that we could discuss them with vigour, create something tangible, and share it with the world.

Whether and to what extent the Manifesto aided the establishment of Product Operations is hard to say definitively - but I’ve heard from enough people who’ve used it to start conversations with their managers to know it at least made a mark. And of that, I am incredibly proud.

But here’s the part I want to be honest about: Three years on, Product Ops practitioners are often still fighting the same battles.

The conversations I have with my coaching clients sound remarkably similar to the conversations I was having with practitioners before the Manifesto existed. The two most common challenges I hear are: I’m overrun with tactical work and cannot get to a strategic level, and I know exactly what I need to do, but I’m not allowed to do it.

Ironically, both of these map directly to two of the prerequisites defined in the Manifesto - the need for Product Ops to be understood as a strategic discipline, and the need for the mandate and trust to actually effect meaningful change.

Why our Discipline Matters More than Ever

I think it’d be easy to look at all the folks in operational roles today, see that they’re still struggling with the same issues they were struggling with a few years ago, and conclude that nothing good has happened. But I believe we are a lot further than we think.

Yes, some companies are still undervaluing the impact their suboptimal operating model has on their bottom line, and yes, not every company with operational staff knows how to make the most use of them - but collectively, we’ve all gained a ton of experience.

We can now point to things that have supercharged how organisations operate. We can clearly articulate the tangible impact we have. We can draw lines. We can communicate trade-offs. But most of all: We know the value we bring, and we’ve learned to differentiate a failed implementation from an organisation that was never ready to begin with.

And while many people in tech are re-thinking their place, their role, and whether there’ll still be a job for them by the end of this year, I genuinely believe that Product Operations is right at the precipice of a new era.

Looking Ahead

It’s undeniable that a shift in how we create products is upon us. New tooling and capabilities means the bottlenecks are not where they once were, and what we optimised for in the past is no longer what will propel us forward.

AI is here - but it has yet to be operationalised. Companies are scrambling to make use of it, but so far implementations are disjointed, hyperlocal, and siloed, where what is truly needed is context-driven, collaborative, and holistic. And I can’t think of a better discipline to make that happen than Product Operations.

The emergence of agentic AI and the opportunities that lie in human-machine teams as a genuine operating model is going to demand exactly the kind of work Product Ops practitioners excel at. And right now we are standing before a future where setting our organisations up for success means thinking through how people and agents interact with our operating model.

Agents, unlike humans, don’t adapt to dysfunctional systems out of politeness, politics, or self-preservation. They naturally expose gaps by delivering substandard output. They amplify the inconsistencies people have always worked around just to get things done. And organisations that don’t have clear systems, clean data, or a shared and codified understanding of how decisions get made will find that agentic AI makes those problems significantly worse, not better.

This is not a far-future concern. The companies already experimenting with AI-augmented product teams are discovering that the bottleneck isn’t the models - it’s the organisational infrastructure around it. Who owns the company-specific context that the agent needs to operate? Who decides which systems connect to which? Who builds the custom tooling that makes any of this usable in practice? Who makes sure the humans and the machines are actually set up to do their best work?

It’s us.

Onwards and Upwards

When I sat down to write this, I thought I’d feel more reflective. More inclined to look backwards, see just how far we’ve come, and take stock.

But the truth is, the more I think about where Product Operations sits right now, the harder I find it to look anywhere but forward.

The Product Operations Manifesto was never supposed to be the final word on anything. It was merely a starting point - a shared set of values and commitments that twelve people agreed on, and that nearly 200 more have since put their names to. It gave practitioners something to point to when the words weren’t coming. It gave organisations a mirror to hold up against their own assumptions about what Product Ops is and what it needs.

That job isn’t finished - not by a long shot.

But if there was ever a time to double down on what we bring to the table - it’s right now.

Happy birthday, Manifesto - now, let’s get back to work 💪