What Product Ops Really Does: Pendo's Christine Itwaru on a Role Built to Free Up PMs

Lenny admits he has never worked with product ops and starts with the basics. Itwaru gives two definitions. First, product operations is something you do: creating a system that lets a head of product, VP or product manager thrive. Second, and more common, is the person or group who partner with PMs and, in more mature teams, advise the CPO with qualitative and quantitative data for better decisions.

She does not think the underlying problems are new. As a former PM she felt that pain acutely, though people from consulting or technical success experience the role as new. At Pendo, a colleague joked in the summer of 2019 that it was the birth of product ops, because everyone suddenly wanted something to make product better.

She names several forces behind the rise. Customers wanted voice-of-customer management and synthesis, there was pain around internal alignment and transparency toward revenue teams, and rapid growth during the pandemic and the move to product-led tactics added pressure. She also sees a natural maturation, as with marketing and sales, plus a CPO job that shifted from delivering features toward business outcomes, which she ties to Marty Cagan's writing.

Itwaru first addresses PMs' worry that the role creates friction. She suggests asking what you hold PMs accountable for, and insists that spending time with customers and engineers must never be taken from them. She now sees former PMs asking to move into product ops. The most mature teams focus on voice of customer, combining quantitative and qualitative inputs, and tailoring it for mature teams versus fast-moving teams building something new.

Other areas include tooling, such as keeping the connections between Pendo, Salesforce, Looker and other systems working for PMs, and content strategy, which means treating education as part of the definition of done. She says the process piece is the controversial one, since some wonder if it is simply program management or agile. Some companies, she notes, now put program management under product.

At Pendo, voice of customer meant bringing sales, success and professional services into a room after realizing each was asking for something different. PMs received risk data, high-priority deals, and feedback split by prospects versus paying customers, which research then validated or disputed. The team also taught revenue colleagues that not every friction point needs a product change, since it can be an enablement or documentation fix.

On research, Pendo's user research team reports into UX and does proactive research, while product ops combines inputs such as support feedback and NPS and brings them to research for sense-making. For content, Itwaru describes using Pendo guides and the product's NPS themes beta to teach customers in-app, working with product marketing on playbooks that reduce friction in a product-led world.

Lenny asks whether product ops only suits B2B companies with many internal stakeholders. Itwaru says her experience contradicts that, since large B2C companies in retail and finance also have heavy cross-functional engagement. The common thread is cross-functional transparency and readiness, both inside the company and for customers facing something new.

To persuade skeptical PMs and leaders, she asks what PMs are meant to drive and how they are measured. The most successful efforts have buy-in from the CEO, CPO or head of product who can see the value. Her two strongest bullet points are asking whether you want PMs constantly fielding revenue-team questions instead of spending time with customers, and asking how outcomes are measured and made transparent at scale.

What would a PM never give up? Itwaru says it is spending time with customers and watching their pain, recalling how she fell in love with product after watching an internal user fight with his keyboard and mouse. She adds that anyone who does not want to be in that conversation should not be in product. She also describes product ops as a partner that filters the noise PMs face, and says the role mostly takes work from PMs, and sometimes agile roles, with early hires often asked to streamline planning.

Itwaru says the difference from program managers and agile facilitators is that product ops people understand the product, the customer and the inner workings of the business. Lenny mentions Marty Cagan's view that product owners rarely become great PMs because they miss customer needs. He then raises Casey Winters's argument that ops is often a Band-Aid for inefficiency and that tooling or process should replace people over time.

She disagrees with the premise but agrees with the conclusion. A growing need for ops reflects maturing roles and organizations, she says, which is more a sign of growth and opportunity than of inefficiency. She does agree that product ops should stand up the process or system and then get out of the way so people can focus on more strategic work.

She lived this herself, recently changing roles at Pendo after standing up systems that were either handed to other teams or automated. Her aim is for the team to move to bigger questions, such as increasing retention, growth in a specific area, in-app experience and voice of customer management. She tells candidates to join only if they are comfortable letting go of things, and Lenny sums up the job as automating your current work to find more strategic work.

Itwaru says signs you need product ops include a lack of transparency in many directions, and weak alignment with revenue teams in particular. At Pendo the first focus was aligning success and sales with the product team, and the quality of inbound questions improved over about a quarter. The questions shifted from "teach me how to do this" to thematic ones about what customers would benefit from.

The catalyst was a bad launch in her fifth week as a director, the biggest in the company's history since the product's launch. The area had been in development for about eight months, and the organization lacked readiness. People knew it was coming but not how to position it or talk about it, and the team had also missed chances to test with customers and measure impact.

Her reaction was not to ask for a product ops role, but to create a system so it would not happen again. A survey asked PMs how much time went to firefighting for revenue teams and asked revenue teams how often they had questions, which showed a transparency gap. The result was a product digest focused on how to get ready and excited, not just dates.

On the line with product marketing, she says PMM positions and helps revenue teams sell with lead gen and campaigns, while product ops educates internal teams on added value and how a feature affects their roles. Product ops does not teach people to sell or position. It helps them understand the new value and use the product.

Itwaru is pleased that PMs now ask to become product ops, rather than seeing it as a threat. She says it suits people who love healthy team environments and cross-functional collaboration, and who knew the pain of making small changes and measuring value as PMs. You still talk to customers, she says, but they are internal ones, and one PM she managed fell in love with understanding the business.

Early product ops people often came from management consulting, customer success and technical success, and she has seen a few PMs but no one from sales yet. She strongly advocates that the people who stand up product ops, as the first leadership hire, are former product people. They have felt the pain of customer problems and know where to place effort, and the business sees that they are not wasting time.

For job seekers, she says there is no shortage of openings but little consistency across companies, so read descriptions closely and know your strengths, whether data-focused, technical or both. The motivation she highlights is standing up the system you wish you had as a PM. A red flag is any description with no stated measure of success, which she calls table stakes.

Pendo's product organization is split into major business areas with general managers, all with PM backgrounds, a head of growth, senior directors and teams of PMs, all rolling up to a CPO. A product ops person is integrated into most teams but shared across two or three. She says there is no fixed ratio, the team operates lean, and every few quarters they assess which goals need product ops and why.

For a newer product still finding its way, she says her motto is "respect the hustle", meaning no heavy planning process that stifles creativity. Data and voice-of-customer work is quicker there, focused on what is being learned and how fast it reaches the team to iterate. Mature products get a more process-oriented approach.

In the lightning round she recommends *Inspired* by Marty Cagan, *Leaders Eat Last*, *The Product-Led Organization* from Pendo's CEO and *Product Roadmaps Relaunched*, and mentions the Product Experience podcast and HBR IdeaCast. Her favorite interview question asks which other career a candidate would choose and why, and her favorite tools include Miro, Figma, Seismic and Gong. She also highlights what she calls a small change with large impact.

That change was bringing engineers to customer meetings. Engineers rarely volunteer, but once they saw customers' pain and delight firsthand, many wanted to do it more, their confidence grew, and their input carried more weight in planning. She says any PM or product leader not doing this should start quickly, as it is life changing for the team.