What is product operations? Role, skills, and trends

Fast-growing companies and product teams quickly realize they need help to keep momentum. Every stage of the product lifecycle takes time, research, and data to validate that you’re moving in the right direction.

Researching a product’s market fit, collecting user feedback, prioritizing features and building a roadmap, planning for launch… all of this involves corralling teams, implementing technology, and communicating regularly. This is where a product operations team becomes a helpful engine behind these tasks and the much-needed connective tissue to keep everyone working toward the same goals, as efficiently as possible.

This team, also known as ‘product ops’ or ‘ProdOps,’ sits at a vital intersection with a company: between learning and development (L&D), product management, engineering, and customer success—and increasingly, other go-to-market functions. Product ops ensure everyone speaks the same language, has the support they need, and reduces friction so everyone can do their jobs better. Here we’ll take a closer look at the role of a product operations manager, the skills needed, and current trends impacting the field.

What is product ops?

Product operations enable product teams to scale efficiently by optimizing processes, managing data, and facilitating cross-functional collaboration. It allows product teams to focus on building exceptional user experiences rather than getting bogged down in administrative tasks.

As Melissa Perri, Founder and Lead Instructor at Product Institute, shared on LinkedIn:

“Product operations is the backbone of a successful product management function at scale. It provides the essential inputs and infrastructure needed to set strategy, prioritize initiatives, and streamline ways of working. By pulling information from across the organization into a cross-functional view, product operations helps leaders and product managers make strategic decisions that align the entire organization around common goals.”

What do product operations do?

Product operations teams act as force multipliers, removing friction from product development workflows and enabling data-driven decision-making. Unlike traditional product management, which focuses on product strategy and product roadmap development, product ops concentrates on the systems, tools, and processes that make product teams more effective throughout the entire product lifecycle. This discipline has emerged as companies recognize the need for dedicated operational expertise to support increasingly complex product organizations and product portfolios.

Product ops bridge the gap between product strategy and tactical execution by creating scalable systems. At its core, product ops focuses on three key areas: process optimization, data management, and cross-functional coordination. This involves everything from standardizing how product requirements are documented to implementing tools that provide real-time visibility into product performance metrics post-launch events.

Product operations’ job responsibilities

Product ops managers wear many hats, with responsibilities that typically include a mix of these tasks:

Why does a company need product ops?

As product teams scale, the complexity of managing multiple products, features, and stakeholders increases exponentially—all while product teams need to be agile and speed time-to-market. Without dedicated operational support, product managers often find themselves spending more time on administrative tasks than strategic work, which slows down the entire process. Airtable found that the majority of product leaders reported spending at least 66% of their week on manual work.

Product ops addresses this challenge by creating systematic approaches to common operational challenges. Companies with mature product ops functions report significant improvements in team productivity, cross-functional alignment, and time-to-market for new product and major feature launches.

Product operations vs. product management

While product management and product operations work closely together, they have distinct focuses and skill sets. Product managers own the "what" and "why" of product decisions—defining strategy, prioritizing features, and ensuring products meet customer needs.

Product ops owns the "how"—creating the systems and processes that enable product managers to execute effectively. Where product managers focus on external factors like market needs and competitive positioning, product ops focuses on internal optimization and operational excellence.

This division of labor allows product managers to make informed decisions throughout the product lifecycle and ensures that operational requirements receive dedicated attention from specialists with the right expertise.

How is AI changing product operations?

AI is fundamentally changing the product development process as it’s widely used across teams and incorporated into nearly every development and product analytics tool. The promise is that AI can help teams build better products faster, and there are many opportunities to apply automation and glean rapid insights toward that goal.

For many of us, there’s an adjustment period as we adapt our skill sets to effectively incorporate AI. But once we do, there’s a lot to be gained. Here are a few ways that AI can help ProdOps teams support broad organizational goals:

Driving AI adoption is easier with tools purpose-built for product operations. For instance, Airtable ProductCentral embeds AI at the core—not as an add-on—so your team can seamlessly integrate it into how they plan, prioritize, and execute work.

Product operations trends

ProdOps, like many teams, is feeling a shift towards being measured against business outcomes rather than just operational metrics. Here are a few current trends in the product landscape

Revenue accountability

In 2024, 92% of product leaders were responsible for revenue, which is high pressure and means that product leaders need a lot of information from product management teams, quickly, to understand marketing and go-to-market outcomes, user feedback, and impact on customer retention. This reflects a broader shift toward product organizations taking ownership of revenue results, not just user satisfaction or adoption metrics. ProdOps teams helped connect the dots and enable product teams to collect and use this data.

Deeper cross-functional integration

Modern product ops requires deeper integration with product marketing, sales, and customer success teams—and their tools. This trend reflects the growing recognition that product success depends on alignment across the entire customer journey. Anthony Maggio, head of product management at Airtable, shared that responsibility for revenue outcomes requires new ways of working, with deeper integration with both cross-functional teams and systems.

AI-first operations as the norm

There’s no doubt that AI is evolving product operations roles, streamlining routine, day-to-day tasks. As ProdOps teams increasingly adopt AI, those who don’t will face a slower time-to-market, giving your competitors an edge. Our data revealed that 31% of product leaders who reported “extensive” use of AI claimed increased speed to market, and 37% reported better feature prioritization, which is meaningful to the overall user experience.

Focus on automating generalist tasks

According to Airtable’s 2025 product predictions, it will be critical to automate generalist tasks and focus on developing deep expertise in specific areas. For ProdOps teams, AI can synthesize vast amounts of data, in different formats, in seconds. It can also helps with documentation of things like product requirements, or be used for prediction and prototyping. Consider that 40% of product leaders reported relying on manual processes to understand the voice of the customer, and only 31% had confidence that they were shipping the right products for their customers.

Product operations example

HubSpot demonstrates the power of making effective operational decisions to save the team time and, importantly, gain more visibility into the status of content production for HubSpot Academy. In this example, the product is inbound marketing, sales, and service educational courses that allow individuals and businesses to earn certificates and grow their companies. The Academy Team was working with a large cross-functional team of instructors and content producers, but details were buried within Google Docs and deadlines were missed.

“We had been using Google Docs to have some visibility into what our professors were working on,” Principal Program Strategist Julien Clement explains. “Our video editors need to know, 'When is that supposed to be done so that I can take the video and edit it?' And then, once the video's edited, when can we launch it? There's a lot of moving parts in there, and it became unworkable because we weren't able to be efficient.”

To gain cross-functional visibility, HubSpot implemented Airtable as a key strategic and operational tool. It allows both internal and external teams to access the same information—thousands of videos and documents—now stored in a single location and accessible through customized views.

This move to a centralized platform saves 30 hours a week on product management. “We can actually do real product management now!” Clement says.

"Within the first few months, we'd already saved close to 300 hours of manual data entry–labor of copying information over, double-checking things that shouldn't need double-checking. Now, we can be much more scientific.”

Product operations skills

Successful product ops managers combine analytics know-how with operational skills and strong communication.

Product operations tools

The product ops toolkit includes platforms that support data analysis, process management, and cross-functional collaboration, such as:

Some platforms focus narrowly on one area, like collaboration or customer feedback. Others—like ProductCentral—bring multiple capabilities together, or seamlessly integrate with the tools your team already relies on. To choose the right fit, your ProdOps team should evaluate your broader needs and make an informed decision.

Scale your product operations with ProductCentral

ProductCentral empowers product operations teams with AI-driven tools to streamline launch readiness and execution. From aligning roadmaps and prioritizing features to orchestrating cross-functional workflows, it centralizes every step of the product launch process. With ProductCentral, ProdOps ensures teams move from concept to market release efficiently, stay agile, and keep customer needs at the heart of every decision.

See for yourself by booking a demo.