Analytics: A Job for Product Managers or Product Ops?
The other week I was chatting with a few of my consultants over dinner about whether product data and analytics should be owned by individual product managers or by the Product Ops team. They just about jumped out of their chairs when I asked the question — apparently, folks feel very passionate about this highly-discussed subject! Before I tell you where we landed, I want to reiterate why this is such an important topic and also shed light on the value of having transparent and standardized processes around analytics.
The Importance of Analytics to Product-Led Organizations
A company's product development and delivery processes are only as good as the data that drives the decision-making behind it. When done right, product analytics help you tell stories, win buy-in, make adjustments and refinements, and deliver better value to the customer. Without it, you’re just shooting fish in a barrel.
But whose job should it be to wrangle all of the data – the individual Product Manager, or the Product Ops team?
Now, I have to admit that my original thinking was a little old school. Wouldn’t removing this responsibility from the PM water down their role? Isn’t understanding product performance fundamental to their job? And while I’m all for making PM roles more manageable, I feared that removing data and analytics from their responsibilities might also take away a sense of ownership and accountability over outcomes. There’s a difference between knowing the information and outsourcing it.
But I sort of came full circle on my thinking. Here’s where we landed:
Data & Analytics: The Responsibility is a Both/And Rather Than an Either/Or
My consultants and I agreed that Product Managers, at the very least, need to be responsible for coming up with hypotheses about their product, knowing which questions to ask, what to measure, and which tests to run. They need a keen awareness of whether a product is instrumented appropriately and should be able to look at data and act on it.
Product Ops, on the other hand, should be responsible for assembling and harmonizing data to ensure consistency in how data is collected, stored, and distributed across the whole product portfolio. This important role would involve standardizing definitions and processes, making it easier for PMs to use the data to tell a story beyond the org and also for stakeholders to evaluate the information.
For example, standardized processes could help a VP looking at data across portfolios to evaluate things apples to apples – they already know the universal language and don't have to re-learn different frameworks used by different teams, which means they can stay focused on the story.
Product Ops May Already Support Analytics, Officially or Not
In talking this out with my consultants, I realized that despite my bias I had actually leveraged a Product Ops person for data management back in my PM days.
At the time, I was managing five different products in my portfolio, each with their own instrumentation and tagging. The data was starting to get unruly even for me, and that was before I had to socialize it with the broader org. So what did I do? I hired an analytics person for my product team to help standardize the data. Doing this helped me tell a confident and consistent story about product performance to the broader org, and that was necessary to keep our work moving forward.
In Conclusion
After that bit of self-reflection, I could only laugh. This trend emerged before we even had a name for it. My honest opinion now is that as long as teams are clear and consistent about the roles and responsibilities between Product Managers and Product Ops, dual ownership of data and analytics is a beneficial partnership for product-led organizations. Not only will it help teams do their jobs better, but it will also help them deliver products with the most value to the consumer and in the highest support of the org’s goals. In my mind, that’s a win-win.
Want more related reading? Check out these resources:
All the Best Product People Share this Essential Product Management Skill
What’s Project-to-Product (P2P) Transformation? Understanding This Essential Paradigm Shift
Hat tip to Maura Charles and Kirsten Hunter for the lively discussion over pizza and pasta in Minneapolis last month. Thanks for keeping me honest and making me realize I was being a stick in the mud!