How To Develop Your Product Operating Model/Playbook using Product Thinking

I often discuss developing your company/operating model using product techniques. (Use an Agile Product Operating Model to develop your Agile Product Operating Model). Today's post is a collaboration with my wife, Vered, where she outlines a somewhat concrete playbook for doing just that—developing your product playbook like it was a product—collaboratively, iteratively, focusing on outcomes, steering with evidence. It's the essence of Product Operations. Enjoy!

A Product playbook is a repository of best practices, processes, and tools that streamline product management. It ensures that products meet customer expectations and drive business growth.

This document suggests an approach for building such a playbook. Of course, the content will vary based on the organization’s culture, structure, stakeholders, and needs. 

This playbook can be considered a product serving the Product Organization and the Company. With that in mind, here is an approach for developing it using product techniques. 

This includes being customer-centric (the Product professionals being the customers), involving relevant stakeholders, and iteratively discovering and delivering increments of the playbook to delight Product Professionals and help them do better product work. 

Start with the Why? Define Purpose & Goals  

Review and agree with stakeholders on the goals and outcomes of this playbook:  

1. Align product management processes for consistency, efficiency, and cross-functional collaboration. 
2. Enhance decision-making and communication across the company’s product teams. 
3. Leverage this playbook to help onboard new PMs and ensure they clearly understand processes, tools, and expectations.
4. Serve as a guiding framework for consistent product excellence, communication, and collaboration at the Product Organization.  

Who needs to be involved? Identify Key Collaborators  

1. Product Management: Heads of Product, Senior PMs, Product Owners. 
2. Engineering & Design: Tech Leads, UX/UI Designers, QA Leads. 
3. Customer-Facing Teams: CSMs, Sales, Support. 
4. Product Marketing: Product Marketing Managers ensure product features and market positioning alignment. 
5. Data & Analytics: Analysts providing metrics & insights. 
6. Operations & Enablement: Project Managers, RevOps.  

How to gather data? Collaboration Structure  

1. Establish a Single Source of Truth: Use a collaboration tool like Notion, Confluence, or Miro for asynchronous collaboration and documentation. This is the central hub where all inputs, insights, and templates are collected and refined.
2. Workshops: Cross-functional sessions to gather insights and identify gaps. 
3. Focus Groups: Deep dives into specific areas (e.g., Roadmapping, Discovery, Decision Making, Prioritization, Launch). 
4. 1-on-1 Interviews: Senior stakeholders for detailed feedback. 
5. Surveys: Broader quantitative input.  

Create a Steering Committee  

1. Key group representatives will guide and champion the playbook and ensure company strategy alignment. 
2. Establish regular check-ins for feedback and course corrections.  

Key Components of a Product Management Playbook

1. Product Vision & Strategy: Defining, documenting, and communicating the company’s product vision and strategic objectives, and how to align it to the company’s strategy
2. Product Development Lifecycle: Clearly defined stages from discovery, planning, development, launch, and post-launch.
3. Roadmapping & Prioritization: Frameworks and tools for prioritizing features, initiatives, and setting timelines.
4. Decision-Making Frameworks: Guidelines for making trade-offs and ensuring alignment with strategic goals.
5. Stakeholder Management: Best practices for communication, collaboration, and reporting.
6. Metrics & Measurement: Clear metrics to measure success, track progress, and continuously improve.
7. Using Agile & Lean Methodologies: How to leverage agile and lean principles for iterative development, faster feedback loops, steering with evidence, and reducing waste.
8. Encouraging a Customer-Centric Mindset: Ensuring product decisions are driven by customer needs, insights, and feedback throughout the product lifecycle.
9. Onboarding & Training: A standardized process to onboard new PMs and get them up to speed quickly.

Develop the Playbook Iteratively (Like a Product…)

1. Discovery & Research: Map existing processes & pain points. 
2. Prioritize high-impact opportunities and Select one improvement area at a time
3. Focus on a Clear Outcome-based Goal
   1. Define clear KPIs: Adoption Rate, Satisfaction Scores, Onboarding Success, as well as leading outcome indicators.
4. Learn from High-Performing PMs/Teams internally and externally:
   1. Gather Insights: Interview high-performing PMs and cross-functional stakeholders to understand what works best. 
   2. Observe High-Performing Teams: Shadow top-performing PMs and teams during planning sessions, roadmap reviews, and retrospectives to identify effective practices. 
   3. Adopt and integrate: Incorporate effective frameworks, road mapping techniques, prioritization methods, and feedback loops from top performers. 
5. Draft Framework: Create outlines for Processes, Roles, and Tools sections. 
6. Test & Refine: Build and refine templates with stakeholder feedback. 
7. Communicate and Rollout: Deploy and enable the wider product organization.
   1. Announce the initiative via various communication methods: Slack, Email, and Town Halls. 
   2. Provide regular updates & host training sessions. 
   3. Ensure easy access to the playbook. 
   4. Create a feedback mechanism for continuous improvement. 
8. Review and Adapt:
   1. Measure adoption and impact
   2. Continuous improvement through feedback loops until the desired outcomes are achieved.  

Final Thoughts

In this playbook we outlined a product-oriented approach for building a product playbook – also known as a product operating model. 

Using this approach, a Product organization can take pragmatic, nuanced increments towards improving how it operates. 

This can allow Product organizations to scale with consistency, deal with dramatic changes (e.g. GenAI adoption), and continuously improve the Product Management experience, in a way that is sustainable, collaborative, and impactful. 

Learn more about how Vered and Yuval help Product Leaders develop their product organization using Product Operations