Episode 235: Inside Product Ops: How Teams Scale Strategy
In this episode, Quincy Hunte, Mark Rosenberg, Vivian Finney, Jessica Soroky and Hugo Froes join Melissa Perri to delve into the evolving world of Product Operations (ProdOps) and its impact on scaling product management within organizations. They explore how structuring product operations can enhance efficiency, align business and technology goals, and transform how product teams function. The conversation also touches on the integration of AI in prod ops, aiming to elevate strategic involvement while minimizing administrative tasks.
Join us to discover how these leaders are pioneering scalable planning, OKR systems, and treating internal teams as customers to improve decision-making and reduce friction.
Want to learn how to optimize product operations for better strategic insights and decision-making? Tune in to this episode to gain practical insights and strategies for enhancing your product management functions.
You’ll hear us talk about:
08:45 - Structuring Product Operations for Efficiency
Quincy Hunt discusses the significance of structuring product operations to boost efficiency and align technology with business goals. He emphasizes the need for agile teams and clear decision-making roles, which are crucial for product managers to understand.
18:20 - AI's Role in Shifting from Admin to Strategy
The conversation shifts to how AI can transform product operations by reducing the focus on administrative tasks, allowing product managers to engage more in strategic roles and decision-making processes.
31:50 - Treating Internal Teams as Customers
Mark Rosenberg and Vivian Finney share insights on how treating internal product teams as customers can streamline processes, reduce friction, and improve overall decision-making, which is essential for product managers looking to enhance team dynamics and outcomes.
Episode resources:
Quincy Hunte: https://www.linkedin.com/in/quincyhunte/
Mark Rosenberg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-rosenberg-724653/
Vivian Phinney: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivian-phinney/
Jessica Soroky: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicasoroky/
Hugo Froes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugofroes/
Other Resources:
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Quincy Hunte: ~So~ when I think about operations or product operations is about how do you pull together the organization, not just the product team, but the organization as a whole to orchestrate all the different moving parts that impact that customer's experience, that impacts the efficiency, that impacts the outcomes of what you're trying to deliver. Product operations is almost like the, and I think you may have said this in your book is almost like the glue that holds things together to make sure that everybody is synchronized and seen and doing the same thing in the benefit of the cusp.
[00:00:33] Jessica Soroky: I hope that, like I mentioned earlier, Proops can be seen as this strategic part of that equation and not get lost in some of the administrative stuff. Where I've seen organizations be successful in being strategic, it is game changing for those, not even just those product works for that entire company. So I hope we continue to lean into that and I hope that product ops folks out there continue to fight the good fight because I know it is frustrating sometimes to try to constantly convince folks that what you're doing is good and valuable for them, but when you can break through, it's so worth it.
Intro
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[00:01:05] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
[00:01:33] Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
[00:01:42] Melissa Perri: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. This week we're continuing our special series of compilation episodes. This time we're diving into one of the most impactful shifts we have seen in how companies scale product management, product operations.
[00:01:56] Over the past year, I've had the chance to speak with incredible leaders who built, scaled, or transformed product ops functions into high growth organizations. In this episode, we're revisiting those conversations to unpack what product ops really looks like when it works, and why it's become such a game changer for enabling product teams to focus, align, and deliver at scale.
[00:02:15] Whether you're considering building your first product ops team or evolving an existing one, these clips are full of practical insights on making your strategy actionable, unlocking better decisions with data and creating the infrastructure of product teams need to thrive. Let's get into it. First up you'll hear from Quincy Hunt, VP of Digital Products at Qatar Airways. Quincy lays the groundwork for what makes product operations truly impactful, focusing on structure, leadership, and the glue that aligns business and tech to serve customers better.
Prod Ops fundamentals
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[00:02:42] Quincy Hunte: So when I think about operations or product operations is about how do you pull together the organization, not just the product team, but the organization as a whole to orchestrate all the different moving parts that impact that customer's experience, that impacts the efficiency, that impacts the outcomes of what you're trying to deliver.
[00:03:04] Product operations is almost like the, and I think you may have said this in your book is almost like the glue that holds things together to make sure that everybody is synchronized and seen and doing the same thing in the benefit of the cusp.
[00:03:16] Melissa Perri: When you are advising people on how to set up product operations and looking at this, are there core components that you've seen be very helpful?
[00:03:24] Quincy Hunte: I, yeah, so that spans across the different areas that I spoke about before about, the operational structure or the organizational structure. There's the technology component that I spoke about, the product management, and then there's the measurements and analysis. So those are the key areas that I see the areas that I focus on for customers.
[00:03:42] Now, when we think about, talk about the organizational structure the things that, that come up the most is deconstructing and decomposing their product teams into smaller, more agile teams. And, and within Amazon we call this two pizza teams. So these smaller teams I can. Be able to move quicker and respond to our customers and be able to experiment, iterate and move really fast.
[00:04:05] It's also important as part of that team construct that you have, your single threaded leaders. Again, that really helps to accelerate your decision making. And we find, what I've seen in organizations is that sometimes you don't have clearly around who's that single person who's making a decision.
[00:04:21] It's always I'm not sure if I should make that decision because it, it may touch on, Melissa's domain and I don't want to upset her, or I think she should make the call, or, her technology area is gonna be impacted if I make a good call. So I think that's, part of an important part that, I see.
[00:04:38] The other thing I always, tell some of my customers about that I think is super crucial and it sounds si very simple, is having those set of leadership principles as well as tenants. 'cause what it is providing some sort of guideposts in terms of. When I think about my organizational practices and the structure, like what am I being guided by?
[00:04:58] What has given me a sense of, okay, this is the framework of what are the things that are important for the business, what's important for the customers, what's important for my team? So I think those are important things. And then the other part, which I think is super important, as I mentioned, is about the technology and as well as infrastructure.
[00:05:15] So those things such as, how do I decompose my architecture or my infrastructure to be much more microservices based? And how do I leverage my APIs to ensure that, I decouple all these systems that were hardcoded to each other, to allow for a lot more autonomy, to allow for a lot more flexibility and for us to be much more responsive.
[00:05:38] And it's also important that, when you're thinking about technology and your infrastructure, it's not just about the technology platform that's serving your external customer. It's also about your internal mechanisms that are serving your internal builders. So how do we, mechanize things or tasks to automate them in a way that is taken away from the work and the capacity that, these product teams need you order to build.
[00:06:06] So really driving automation of low value tasks to automate certain things. And then it's also important to be able to have systems in place that allows teams to, to self-serve. When you think about your APIs, is there an API library? Is there a document repository where, people can go in and find use cases around some of the experiments that you did and what were the outcomes of the experiments?
[00:06:28] And then also it's very important, which I think is key and integral to, when you think about technology and the business is ensuring you have that alignment between the business and the technology team. I cannot state how many times I walk into to organizations and there is complete disalignment.
[00:06:49] They have conversations on one side here with business team, and then we have conversations on the technology side. And these two are not talking to each other and they have different objectives, they have different goals, and they're just not syncing. So I think that's super important when we think about operational operational elements that help accelerate, the speed of how we perform and build products.
[00:07:09] And I always tell, the funny thing is, Melissa, when I go into the customers, I always say the funniest thing, the most valued that we create is not necessarily all the great things we tell you in terms of how you transform. When we come in the room, that's probably the only time the technology and the business functions sit together and that's the best value that we deliver.
[00:07:31] We're bringing these organizations together to actually speak to each other. Which is a absolute insane thing. So in the absence of us being around, they're doing things in their own silos. When we come in, that's when they come in and speak to each other. And I think that's, where we create a lot of value.
Bridging tech and business through prod ops
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[00:07:45] Quincy Hunte: And then obviously there's the product management, areas that I spoke about, which talks about, our working backwards, our narratives, our way, we break up products into the different product taxonomy areas. So you can have a very strong product portfolio, the way we make decisions in terms of our decision mechanisms, one way, two way doors.
[00:08:02] And then last but not least, but I think it's also important in order to have a clear idea of how your users, your customers are consuming your products. So are you having very clear user engagement and usage tracking elements in place to understand your customers? Are you instrumenting your technology stack in terms of how you provide services or how your customers are using and adopting your services?
[00:08:27] And then on the other spectrum is those customers who are moving towards a SaaS model, which is a bit different flavor. They may be on the cloud, but they wanna move towards the SAS SaaS model. It's also important for them to start instrumenting their internal operations. And why I say that is because it's important for them to know exactly how their internal products are performing.
[00:08:50] Not for the external customer, but internally. How long is their uptime? How long is the wait time in certain transactions? Are their APIs connecting fast enough? All those internal KPIs that were not before important to a product manager are now important, especially when you're in the SaaS world. 'cause all those things impact the customer experience.
[00:09:09] So I think when we think about product operations, those are the kind of the key things that I think about are the elements. We I would discuss with the customer to help them evolve their current state.
[00:09:18] Melissa Perri: Next we hear from Mark Rosenberg, VP of Product Management, and Vivian Finney, principal product manager at Workday. Mark shares how his team treated internal product teams like customers, using product ops to remove friction and unlock better delivery and decision making. Vivian takes us inside the data challenges of scaling product ops and how she led efforts to create standardization that unlocked strategic insights without stifling autonomy.
Driving visibility and standardization at scale
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[00:09:42] Melissa Perri: When you were looking to get started with all these great ideas, Hey, we gotta fix this, we gotta fix that. How did you start to execute around this?
[00:09:50] Mark Rosenberg: Yep. So we started looking at it, there's some of these things we're talking about, like classifying the, the problem areas and the things that needed the most attention, that visibility was important. And there were a number of, of new leaders and, and kind of org changes, uh, in the, our office of CFO divisions in which is financials, but also our analytics and our planning and our procurement or spend team and getting everybody seen the, at least in financial, at least getting everybody seeing the problems, seeing that we could go faster, seeing that we could de deliver code more safely, we could reduce the risk of bets. That was a key part of it. And coming back to my initial, just going on a listening tour and really looking for the most important pains and seeing that people were like, yeah, we, we, on the scrum teams, product managers, leading individual teams, um, or, OR products feeling like: we could be faster, we could make a bigger impact but there's some structural impediments to that. And we found, we treated our teams like customers. And I think that's really the key C in product operations book. Uh, one of the success stories that, that one of, um, worthy your, your, um, um, folks you interviewed for the book talk about is this, that we, we, we've thought about. Our product managers, those customers, and how do we take the friction outta their day and enable them to deliver better, faster, make better decisions. So if you are keeping them front and center with, and making clear to them the goals, but by the way, you need to make sure that the things you're deciding are clear and transparent, flowing up and flowing sideways.
[00:11:32] They got that and they're like, sign us up. And that's where some of the tooling that that Vivian was critical to doing was naturally consumed. People were like, thank goodness, this is great. We love it. We're happy to fill in this thing and not these other six things because this makes our lives easier and we know that leadership is gonna be happy too.
[00:11:51] Let's go do that. So again, it just come, comes down to seeing where the friction was downward, if you will, again, to the team level, and then also up from above, the visibility to make sure we're aligned to the objectives and then these major initiatives. It took off. It was very easy to get the traction for them.
[00:12:06] Melissa Perri: When you were getting up to speed on, all the stuff that you had to take into account at Workday and figure out where to start how did you narrow down the scope, figure out where I can dive in, where I can have the leverage for that? What did that process look like?
[00:12:20] Vivian Phinney: Yeah. I think as Mark mentioned earlier, it's really leadership, understanding how they can apply resources to make the right decisions, because the impact of that is so broad. And so for me, with the data background, it was immediately about what you mention in product operations where the data just becomes immediately stale.
[00:12:42] That's a fact. It will be immediately stale if you live in the environment of spreadsheets and, you don't have, specialized tooling built out around it. So for me, the first challenge that I understood that I had to unblock was just create visibility into how they had resources invested and the prioritization that their team understood to be working towards, just so that they could stay informed, had to do it in a way where we could standardize the process for teams to surface that information and in a way that could scale.
[00:13:15] To be continuously delivered. As anyone in data knows it's always fun to try and mix and match data sources. That's half, that's more than half the problem is cleaning the data, getting it together, combining it, understanding what you need to pull from various sources. So for me, I understood that would be the most impactful thing that I could do, just to help surface the information to those who could make the decisions that would impact so many people in the org.
[00:13:42] Melissa Perri: And what kind of solution did you end up with to, to make that happen?
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[00:14:09] Vivian Phinney: Yeah, so ultimately we, we started with annual planning, which has since become more of a continuous planning exercise because when you're able to surface that data continuously, leadership can make, on the go decisions about, we got this major request can we actually stop this and do that?
[00:14:26] And so the first thing that I did was trying to understand, I think you mentioned it and escaping the build, but it's about standardizing a hierarchy of describing the work being done. And for us, it's interesting because one of the most complex divisions in the company, in my opinion being new to the apps side of it, and coming from tools, I definitely understood how complex financials was in comparison to some of our older organizations.
[00:14:55] And so for me, the challenge was gonna be defining the work and creating the least amount of standardization required to be all speaking the same language, because you can't ask people to put data into a system unless there's some standardization. At the same time, you have to do it with a change management mindset of helping them understand the value.
[00:15:18] Like why are you asking 'em to do one more thing in their already busy day? And if they can understand that it ultimately unlocks this or it ultimately helps leadership, give them the resources that they desperately need it there's been amazing. Adoption and participation from PMs because they get it and they appreciate it and they're able to speak the same language, which is not an easy thing in an org that doesn't have a standard taxonomy, even within our own division, at least we didn't prior to this, and even that, even as we defined it for financials, it's not the same taxonomy that other colors use. So being able to create that and standardize it in a way that surface that insight for leadership. In a way that they could then telegraph that up too executive levels and describe their investment decisions has been the first major challenge that I tackled.
Balancing autonomy and structure
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[00:16:11] Melissa Perri: Vivian one thing that a lot of people like to push back on with product operations is around this like standardization and process area, right?
[00:16:19] I think there's like a lot of holdover from Agile. Stuff where everybody's oh, process is bad. Let's not talk about process. All right, let's not standardize certain things. Why are you so obsessed about standardization? Can you tell us a little bit about, what your view has been on that since this is literally the problem that you're tackling in a large organization?
[00:16:38] Vivian Phinney: Yeah, so it's interesting because the challenge is always pushing standardization within an org that holds tightly to our own autonomy within the company. So it's interesting pitch to make that we need to standardize in order to not standardize or be subjected to further top-down mandates or requirements.
[00:16:59] I think communicating the value in that. But I think even you've pointed out in prodOps that it's about standardizing as little as possible to have the most impact. And to me and Mark, that generally translates into what do we have to standardize to this extent where we can then just get out of the way?
[00:17:17] How can we get this to the point where we can standardize this, A bit, and at least we can standardize, a taxonomy or an understanding of how we describe the work being done to get out of their way.
[00:17:26] Melissa Perri: Now let's hear from Jessica Roki, senior Director of Product Operations at Pendo. Jessica explores how AI is reshaping the product ops landscape and shares her hopes that it accelerates the shift from admin support to strategic powerhouse.
Integrating AI and evolving product ops tools
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[00:17:39] Melissa Perri: Can you talk a little bit maybe about what you've been observing with the change in product operations and how new tools are coming out and what people are doing to harness them and what that does to actually impact product operations as a team?
[00:17:52] Jessica Soroky: Yeah, I think we should like mark the time for when AI got brought up. Yeah. But I definitely think that what we are seeing with a lot of our customers when it comes to the pro ops conversation is now it was about how do I utilize Pendo to. Optimize customer feedback qualitative and quantitatively. How do I arm my PM to make a data informed decision effectively?
[00:18:14] And now it's okay, how do I do that? But how do I also either marry that or bring in AI functionality to really streamline and get rid of some of the heavy tasks a PM can get bogged down with? And so that's a big trend that we're seeing a lot of. And of course, naturally they're saying what's. Pendo doing with AI and how can we combine these efforts versus having to manage multiple tools for our product organization.
[00:18:37] So that's probably more recent, like even in the last three to six months, that's become a pretty, pretty big topic.
[00:18:43] Melissa Perri: How do you think AI is changing the face of product operations? What do you think it's gonna look like in the near term versus long term future?
[00:18:50] Jessica Soroky: I think it's a really difficult time because it's such an emerging industry still, and like I said, like so many people that we encounter are looking for best practice, are struggling to find a ton of resourcing out there or guidance on how do you do products? So many of the answers are still it depends. It depends on your org and your maturity and all of these things. And what I've heard directly asked of us many times is, don't you just have a template?
[00:19:15] Can't you just, can you just give me this thing that solves my problem for me? And I think weaving AI into that is honestly just overcomplicating and already messy space for companies who are trying to still figure it out. So I'm sure it's gonna have a big impact, especially with data being so prevalent in the product operations job and the more tools and the more AI comes in and tries to optimize our usage of data.
[00:19:42] I think the more it's going to shift. I think if anything, it will help pro ops be able to lean away from some of that, I hate to say administrative tasks and like just data digging, and allow them to be more strategic because they're not having to go through all of that. That's my long-term hope. My biggest fear with Pro Ops is that it will be seen, frankly, a lot like how Scrum Masters were for a long time, which is it can be easily oversimplified into this administrative type of role, and I think there's just so much more value that they can bring.
[00:20:12] So my hope is AI helps speed that timeline up to strategic involvement.
[00:20:18] Melissa Perri: Jessica, when you're thinking about the evolution of product operations for the next five years, what it's gonna look like in the industry in the future, what are you excited about?
[00:20:27] Jessica Soroky: I feel like Pendo would be upset if I didn't say more data. All the data. I think that there, this whole move, digital transformation, product led transformations, this idea that any company can be customer centric and use their product to really drive benefit for their customers is where I hope it continues to go. And I hope that, like I mentioned earlier, Proops can be seen as this strategic part of that equation and not get lost in some of the administrative stuff. Where I've seen organizations be successful in being strategic, it is game changing for those, not even just those product works for that entire company. So I hope we continue to lean into that and I hope that product ops folks out there continue to fight the good fight because I know it is frustrating sometimes to try to constantly convince folks that. What you're doing is good and valuable for them, but when you can break through, it's so worth it.
[00:21:22] Melissa Perri: Finally, Hugo froze head of product operations at OLX. Hugo talks about creating scalable planning and OKR systems that don't slow teams down.
[00:21:31] He shares practical ways to support product leaders without stepping on their autonomy.
Creating scalable planning and OKR systems
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[00:21:35] Hugo Froes: one of the great ways I like to approach product operations. It's about, how do I make myself seem like I have bigger impact without having to be in every single interaction? And here it's important and a lot of people debate whether we're not substituting what product leaders should be doing. I actually say with the right product leaders, they are partners and they're accountable and they take ownership of ton of the stuff where I can just literally help and help shape it with them.
[00:21:59] And I partner with them, but they take it and they take it to their teams. And the success comes from that. If I do it, admire myself and I have to be a police. It never works. Actually. I just get pushback. Whereas if they take the ownership, they go in there and they implement it, they make it their own right. It's incredible. And that's the results I've seen.
[00:22:16] Melissa Perri: What have been the core tenants or the core areas that you are concentrating on and product ops that you found have given the teams the most value?
[00:22:24] Hugo Froes: It's, for me, one thing I always find in every organization I arrive at is one of the key problems is always planning.
[00:22:32] And in bigger enterprise organizations, people argue against this and, oh, how can you do yearly planning? But we do yearly planning, right? We have a stage at one stage of the year where we have to figure out what is the budget we wanna basically allocate for our, every gamble experience.
[00:22:47] Everything we wanna do next year. How do we allocate that budget? So this planning has to happen. But in terms of the organizations trying to turn this as fluid as possible, adaptable and flexible as possible, that's where we see the most value, right? Because teams think, oh, you have these set timelines and this is how it has to work.
[00:23:05] But sometimes it's that simple thing of someone who comes in who's neutral is outside and saying, okay, we know we have to deliver this by this date. Let's actually work backwards, rather than saying, we have to deliver by this date. So let's sit a week before and discuss. No. If you wanna be comfortable here, maybe we need to discuss a month or two months before where it's a relaxed conversation, right?
[00:23:24] You don't feel the pressure. You have to make a decision now. And so by this, we start creating the space for people to be flexible. Start connecting the dots earlier. But another thing we did for example, was with OKRs, a simple thing was defining two or three types of OKRs. And it's like everybody talks about the arc com OKRs, and I get it.
[00:23:43] The problem is, what we noticed was with teams, they were working on an OKR and then they don't see those results for two or three quarters, right? And it's always on their roadmap. It's always there, sitting there and it's bugging them. And you turn around and say, okay, let's break this down. You've got Discovery OKRs, so now you can actually map out discovery you're gonna be doing.
[00:24:01] Next you're gonna be doing build OKRs, right? Because you have to build something that's built around milestones, and then you have outcome OKRs. And so what happened was, strangely enough, this created a bit of a space for that habit of the, I won't even call it dual track. It's almost a triple track, right?
[00:24:16] Which is at any given time you've got some things that are doing discovery, some that are being, and some that are doing launching, right? And actually in outcomes by this. Because what I've seen in organizations is usually, oh. You've assigned an KR that's a hundred percent of your time and you're like, no, there's a hundred other things that have to happen.
[00:24:34] Or us next quarter, we are only gonna be, we're gonna go back to zero. And so it was creating this and it created a huge impact.
Enabling faster decisions through insight curation
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[00:24:39] Hugo Froes: So one of the big ones is always planning, right? Another one we found that could bring potential impact usually for the teams is just organizing insights. And we know what happens, right?
[00:24:50] Any organization we're talking about, whether it's data, whether it's research, whether it's all these different teams, they're creating tons of content around insights, information, and they create dashboards. They create reports, they create, and you look and you think. The amount of time any product team has to figure out where this stuff lives, it's over.
[00:25:11] It's too much of an overload, right? And okay, take a step back and say, how do we bring this so that a product person can go in there and in five minutes I can find what I need and where it is, and then next how do I use that quickly, right? And so it's about making them more efficient and effective in this.
[00:25:24] It's reducing the friction around these things to give them the space to do the work they need to do.
[00:25:29] Melissa Perri: Being able to actually measure the value on it so that, that's a key part of product operations too.
[00:25:35] What do you do to help the measurement side of things, right? Like we're running these OKRs, we're looking at it like, how do you see product ops and data working together there?
[00:25:43] Hugo Froes: Yeah, it's interesting 'cause I've always touched or at least paid attention to data, but until I read your book with Denise, I'd never actually deep dived on the concept.
[00:25:52] And then I realized something that for me it also depends on how the structure of the organization is working, right? So for example. The owners of data are the data teams, right? And what happens is in some cases, they're doing an incredible job of doing the curation of that data for the teams.
[00:26:07] And in that case, i'd probably don't even have to jump in there or do anything around that. However, there are many cases where they have tons of data, they know what to do with that data. There's 500 dashboards, there's tons of people. So there, what we do is, it's the thing I always tell my team, just remember one thing.
[00:26:21] Our job is to help curate the stuff so people can make quicker decisions with more confidence. So we have to find the mechanics to do that. And sometimes we'll work with a data team to do that. Sometimes we'll just, basically a simple thing is, oh, we'll create a list of where all this data lives, right?
[00:26:36] So you can more easily find it. There's simple things we can do, but it is about trying to connect the people to write the information, and that's what we try and do. So we won't always create a dashboard or anything like that, but sometimes you need to create a aggregate, a dashboard because it doesn't exist, or something that gives you that top level view or that gives you the correlation between things. So we, we try and incentivize that.
[00:26:57] Melissa Perri: Everything that you're talking about is so great from a product operations standpoint too, because it's about meeting the company where it's at. It's not reinventing the wheel, you're like filling the gaps in to figure out what do we need and how do we strategically get this done to help our product managers.
[00:27:13] Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next week make sure you leave any questions for me@dearmelissa.com and I'll be sure to answer them on a future episode.
[00:27:21] Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time.