What 2026 Holds for Product Operations
Predictions from the Community
Update: A minor error has been corrected; our friend Hugo Froes has not (yet!) been a guest on our podcast, as was otherwise stated on the original publication. Apologies!
At Product Ops Confidential, we’ve recently been thinking a lot about the past and the future of Product Operations. Between podcast interviews, articles, and ongoing conversations with other practitioners, one question kept surfacing: What does 2026 actually look like for this discipline? And more importantly, could we measure whether we were right?
So we decided to ask a collection of podcast guests and Product Ops experts we love to go on the record with their predictions for the year ahead. The goal? Reconvene in December and see how our predictions held up against reality. No pressure!
What follows is a collection of perspectives from practitioners across the industry as well as our own. Product Operations has become what it is today thanks to a community of professionals working to evolve the discipline - and that evolution continues to be in excellent hands.
Special thanks to all who contributed their perspectives:
Justin Woods - Roadmap Expert & Founder, Roadmapping Heroes
Clare Hawthorne - VP Product Operations, Datavant
Cindy Camacho - Principal Product Operations Manager, Splunk
Malte Scholz - Founder & CPO, Airfocus
Lindsey Shea - VP Product Operations, Inmar Intelligence
Chris Butler - Director of Product Operations, Github
Emily Koehler - Engineering Operations Manager, Expel
Hugo Froes - Director of Product Strategy, Nagarro
Diana Soler - Director of Product Operations & Analytics, Assent
Thorsten Löwenberg - Senior Product Operations Manager, Staffbase
Jana Debusk - Director of Product Operations, Solovis
A Brief Reflection on 2025
2025 saw continued momentum for Product Operations as a discipline. More success stories emerged, more hires were made, and more 0-1 teams were founded. That gradual shift toward recognition of Product Ops as a strategic function - though far from universal - marked real progress.
Additionally, product leaders wrestling with having to do more with less showed renewed interest in what operators could deliver. In short: The word is out. While 2020 saw us asking “What is Product Operations?”, 2025 asked, “How can I use this to my advantage?”
This shift toward more strategic work also prompted operators to evaluate their impact more critically. Many began asking harder questions about whether and to what extent what they were doing was moving the business needle. The answers weren’t always comfortable, but asking the question mattered.
So what comes next? Here are our predictions for 2026.
Prediction 1: AI Graduates from Demos to Plumbing
The Prediction: In 2026, AI’s primary value in product organisations will shift from flashy demos to infrastructure. Product Ops will become the function responsible for “context readiness” - structuring feedback, defining taxonomies, and ensuring clean data pipelines that both humans and AI can rely on for decision-making.
What the community said:
Justin Woods: “With the explosion of new tools and capabilities, organisations will realise that unconstrained tooling choice across teams creates operational fragility. Some level of organisation-wide standardisation will become non-negotiable.”
Clare Hawthorne: “AI graduates from demos to plumbing. Real value will come from embedding AI into planning, forecasting, and synthesis workflows — with data quality and taxonomy, not tooling, as the hard part. This will include the hard work to make sure AI has the right underlying data/access/governance/compliance.”
Cindy Camacho: “Product Ops will increasingly own the ‘insight pipeline’, defining common taxonomies, aligning teams on source of truth, and ensuring that what we learn from customers actually shows up in roadmaps, GTM plans, and adoption strategies. Voice of the Customer will be treated as a system, not a quarterly slide.”
Malte Scholz: “Product Ops will be responsible for standardising tooling, workflows, data models, naming conventions, and integrations – creating a durable system of record that leaders, teams, and AI can actually rely on... Product Ops will be accountable for fixing the plumbing – structuring feedback, linking insights to work, maintaining clean product data, and preserving decision history.”
Our take:
The shift from AI demos to AI infrastructure is real, and Product Ops is well-positioned to lead it. We’re reaching a point where AI tools are reliable enough for everyday product work, which means PMs can focus more on judgment and decision-making rather than the creation of necessary but time-consuming artefacts. Product Ops can facilitate this transition by ensuring teams have access to the right data and systems.
However, there’s an important distinction to make about what Product Ops should own in this space. Data quality and taxonomy work is genuinely difficult - perhaps the hardest part of making AI useful - and it can easily become yet another tactical time sink for well-meaning operators.
The more immediate opportunity lies in what Justin and Malte are highlighting: standardisation and integration. The proliferation of AI tools risks creating new silos and fragmented workflows. Product Ops can add significant value by ensuring systems actually work together, that tooling choices are intentional rather than ad-hoc, and that the infrastructure supporting both human and AI decision-making is coherent and reliable.
Prediction 2: Product Ops Owns “Decision Flow,” Not Just Processes
The Prediction: In 2026, Product Ops will move upstream from process maintenance to actively designing how organisations make decisions. This includes defining clear decision rights (who decides what, when, with what evidence) and creating “decision-grade” infrastructure that captures rationale and dissent, enabling faster movement without sacrificing accountability.
What the community said:
Lindsey Shea: “Product Ops is still fundamentally about increasing decision velocity, improving cross-functional alignment, and making execution more predictable... [It includes] decision rights and governance (where decisions happen, what “decision-ready” means, and who resolves conflict).”
Chris Butler: “The centre of gravity shifts from keeping the machine running to shaping how product organisations make decisions under uncertainty. More teams will treat Product Ops as the function that designs decision flow. What needs to be decided, when, by whom, with what evidence, and how the rationale, including dissent and unknowns, gets captured.”
Our take:
This prediction highlights what strategic Product Operations should fundamentally be about: designing how decisions get made, not just facilitating the meetings where they happen. The shift from process execution to decision architecture represents the maturity that many Product Ops functions have been working toward.
In practice, this means Product Ops takes on responsibility for the flows and systems that enable better decisions across the organisation. Which decisions require what level of evidence? Who makes which calls? How do we capture not just what was decided, but why - including the dissent and the unknowns? This is about creating infrastructure that makes good judgment easier and faster, while maintaining accountability and the ability to learn from outcomes.
The challenge is whether organisations are ready to empower Product Ops to operate at this level. Designing decision flow requires mandate and proximity to strategy. It means having conversations with senior leadership about how the organisation actually works, not just how teams execute. For many Product Ops practitioners who are still focused primarily on ceremonies and tooling, this represents a significant leap in scope and influence.
The question isn’t whether this is going in the right direction - it absolutely is. The question for 2026 is whether more organisations will be able to make that leap - or whether this remains aspirational for most.
Prediction 3: Ops Functions Consolidate into Unified “BizOps”
The Prediction: In 2026, we’ll see growing consolidation of discipline-specific operations (Product, Engineering, Design, Sales) into unified Business Operations or “Product Execution” functions. These consolidated teams will serve as centralised “air traffic control,” though the question of which discipline leads this consolidation will remain contested.
What the community said:
Emily Koehler: “We will also see an increased focus on collaboration with Sales and CS operational roles, perhaps consolidating into a BizOps function for companies shedding staff, or just hoping to have more ‘air traffic control’ over their product and customer-facing functions collectively.”
Lindsey Shea: “Where orgs can afford it, you’ll see consolidation into broader Business Ops / Product Execution umbrellas because leadership wants one operating system, not three adjacent ones.”
Hugo Froes: “Many organisations will merge Ops functions for an optimised output of those teams... The natural approach would be Product Ops as it’s connected to the strategy of the organisation; however, I can easily see many organisations that will put Engineering Operations leading the charge, just because they have more tangible outputs.”
Cindy Camacho: “In smaller companies, Product Ops will often be combined with adjacent disciplines like Program Management or Product Marketing Operations, with one person wearing multiple hats.”
Our take:
This is perhaps the most ambitious prediction on the list, and we’re a little sceptical about the timeline. While the logic makes sense - striving for one coherent operations team rather than multiple adjacent ones - the practical reality is that most individual ops disciplines are still establishing their own value propositions.
There’s undoubtedly a trend toward broader operational scope: We’re already seeing Product Ops teams expanding to support Engineering, Design, Research, Data, and commercial functions. The appeal of consolidation is clear: economies of scale, shared systems and tools, unified approaches to problems that span disciplines. A wider Ops team creates opportunities for specialisation all under one roof.
The question is whether organisations are mature enough in 2026 to recognise the value-add and act on it. Full consolidation requires executive buy-in, clear governance structures, and a sophisticated understanding of operations as a strategic capability. Most companies simply aren’t there yet.
What seems more likely for 2026 is increased collaboration between existing operational roles and gradual scope expansion rather than formal consolidation. The exception, as Cindy notes, is smaller companies where resource constraints already force one person to wear multiple operational hats - though we believe that’s a necessity rather than by design.
Prediction 4: Human Judgment Remains Non-Negotiable
The Prediction: In 2026, despite AI acceleration, human judgment will remain the critical differentiator in product work. Product Ops will be responsible for designing and maintaining “human-in-the-loop” workflows where machine outputs are validated, interpreted, and refined by humans before driving decisions.
What the community said:
Thorsten Löwenberg: “Human judgment will remain essential: supervising outputs, interpreting information, and making decisions in complex, ambiguous environments. In that sense, AI becomes another powerful tool in the toolbelt of an experienced operations manager.”
Jana Debusk: “Product Ops will take on a stronger role in translating customer behaviour, team capacity, and organisational priorities into operational systems while embedding human-in-the-loop processes that ensure machine outputs are validated, actionable, and directly inform decisions.”
Malte Scholz: “As AI produces infinite drafts, prototypes, and recommendations, PMs are forced into constant evaluation mode... Product Ops will define human-in-the-loop practices – judgment checkpoints, evaluation standards, and governance workflows.”
Our take:
This is one of the most important predictions on the list, and the alignment across the community is no doubt encouraging. As AI tools become more capable of generating drafts, prototypes, and recommendations, the temptation to let machines make decisions will only increase. The role of Product Ops in 2026 will be to resist that temptation and design systems that keep humans firmly in control.
Human judgment isn’t a constraint to be minimised - it’s the core capability that separates effective product work from automated mediocrity. The challenge is ensuring that when humans are making decisions, they have the right information, sufficient context, and clear frameworks to exercise that judgment well.
This means that Product Ops practitioners need to focus on designing workflows where AI outputs are inputs to human decision-making, not replacements for it. Creating checkpoints where machine-generated work gets validated, establishing evaluation standards, and enabling teams to assess whether AI recommendations align with strategic priorities and user needs are paramount. Building systems that surface the right context at the right time so that the humans in charge can make informed calls will make or break AI tooling implementations.
As AI accelerates certain aspects of product work, we must ensure that the quality of human judgment keeps pace - or ideally, improves alongside it.
Prediction 5: “Process-Only” Product Ops Roles Hit Their Expiration Date
The Prediction: In 2026, “process-only” Product Ops roles - those focused solely on running ceremonies or managing tools - will begin becoming obsolete. The function must prove its value through measurable business outcomes, portfolio economics, and reduction of “heroic efforts,” or risk being eliminated.
What the community said:
Lindsey Shea: “Product Ops is not ‘extra hands,’ it’s the function that makes strategy executable—through decision clarity, portfolio focus, and operating mechanisms that reduce heroics over time… Product Ops will keep gaining visibility, but it will also keep being at risk of becoming a catch-all. The teams that win this year will be the ones that draw a hard line around scope in a way that leadership respects.”
Clare Hawthorne: “’Process-only’ Product Ops roles have hit their expiration dates. As the function moves up-market into strategy and systems, impact will be measured by business outcomes and leverage, not how many rituals are run.”
Hugo Froes: “In other companies, they will realise that it is a nice-to-have and isn’t always beneficial. In this case, we’ll see many organisations closing their product operations teams.”
Diana Soler: “Product Operations will demonstrate its value by making the productivity, effectiveness, and impact of product organisations visible and measurable to leadership.”
Our take:
This prediction feels both overdue and necessary. Process-only Product Ops roles - those defined primarily by ceremony facilitation and tool administration - have always been vulnerable to the “nice to have” categorisation. As organisations continue operating in constrained environments, roles that can’t articulate their business impact will increasingly be at risk.
The distinction Lindsey and Clare make is critical: Product Ops that makes strategy executable through decision clarity and portfolio focus is fundamentally different from Product Ops that schedules meetings and maintains templates. The former is a strategic capability. The latter is administrative support.
What makes this prediction particularly important is the measurement shift it implies. Diana’s point about making productivity and impact visible isn’t just about better reporting - it’s about reframing how Product Operations demonstrates value. In short, the function needs to show how it reduces decision friction, eliminates heroic efforts, and enables better business outcomes.
For practitioners in roles that skew heavily toward process execution, 2026 represents an inflection point. The path forward requires drawing clearer boundaries around scope, connecting work directly to business objectives, and being able to quantify the value created. The alternative, as Hugo notes, is that organisations will conclude the function isn’t essential - and act accordingly.
What Does This All Mean
Let’s recap what we’re predicting for 2026:
AI graduates from demos to plumbing - The real value shifts to infrastructure, standardisation, and data quality
Product Ops owns “decision flow,” not just processes - The function moves upstream to design how organisations make decisions
Ops functions consolidate into unified “BizOps” - Discipline-specific operations merge into centralised teams
Human judgment remains non-negotiable - Despite AI acceleration, humans stay firmly in control
“Process-only” roles hit their expiration date - The function must prove value through business outcomes or risk elimination
If these predictions hold true, 2026 will mark a clear inflection point for Product Operations. What strikes us most is how much they converge on a single theme: Product Operations must move from execution to design. From running the system to building the system. From supporting teams to enabling better organisational decisions.
The practitioners who will thrive are the ones who can demonstrate concrete business impact, treat decision systems as products, and embed AI tooling as leverage, not the end-goal. The ones who can’t quantify their impact will have a hard time sticking around.
The year ahead will undoubtedly test these predictions. Some will prove correct, while others will miss entirely. We’ll reconvene in December to assess which ones held up and what that tells us about where the discipline is headed.
In the meantime, the work continues. Product Operations has always evolved through practitioners trying things and sharing what worked (and what didn’t). We hope that these predictions can become part of that ongoing conversation.
We’re grateful to everyone who contributed their perspective to this article.
And now, let’s see what 2026 actually brings ⚙️🚀