The State of Product Ops in 2025: Through the Lens of Product Excellence
Product ops has come a long way. Once a niche, often misunderstood function, it’s now central to how product-led organizations scale with focus, clarity, and speed.
The 2025 State of Product Ops Report by Product-Led Alliance (PLA) confirms it: product ops is no longer emerging. It’s embedded. But the report also reveals a function in transition—torn between tactical execution and strategic influence, still battling role ambiguity, and only beginning to tap the power of AI and automation.
At Productboard, we believe product ops is most effective when it supports the journey toward Product Excellence. The Product Excellence framework is an approach grounded in deep user insight, a clear product strategy, and a coherent roadmap.
Here’s what stood out to us from the report and why it’s important for teams building products that truly matter:
👉 Download the full PLA Product Ops Survey 2025
Product Ops Is Scaling… But Still Searching for Clarity
96% of organizations surveyed now have some form of Product Ops function, and nearly half run dedicated, centralized teams.
Yet role clarity emerged as the #1 challenge. As the report notes, product ops often overlaps with project or program management and inherits cross-functional gaps. That’s a problem, but also an opportunity.
Productboard’s Take: When product ops is tied to the three pillars of Product Excellence—insight, strategy, and execution—it becomes easier to define its scope and communicate its impact. At Productboard, product ops isn’t just a support function; it’s the operational backbone of product strategy. These leaders shape team workflows, uphold roadmap and OKR discipline, and ensure that product managers (PMs) can stay focused on what matters most: building products that solve real customer problems. Think of product ops as a PM whose “product” is the internal system itself—processes, tools, and rituals that enable the entire product org to operate effectively.
Alignment and Enablement Are Still the Core Mandates
The top responsibilities for product ops are exactly what we’d expect in teams aiming for Product Excellence:
- 93% drive cross-functional alignment
- 90% manage processes and workflows
- 81% oversee tool and platform administration
These activities help reduce friction, unlock delivery, and keep strategy connected to execution. But fewer than half (47%) consider product data and analytics reporting a core function of product ops—and just 58% said they aggregate customer feedback.
Productboard’s Take: To truly enable deep user insight, product ops must play a bigger role in closing the feedback loop by scaling the voice of the customer (VoC) and making it usable. That’s how product teams prioritize with confidence and avoid building features no one uses. And in the age of AI, building the right products faster is not going to be just an ideal, it’ll be THE differentiator. We predict we’ll see a shift in tooling priorities toward AI voice of customer solutions that aggregate and surface customer feedback trends to build a strategic advantage.
Business Value Is Becoming the New Focus
As product ops matures, its role is evolving from a focus on process orchestration to a broader mandate of strategic enablement—one that requires a fundamental shift in how teams operate. This evolution demands a holistic approach: no longer limited to smoothing workflows or facilitating rituals, product ops must now prove their impact, scale it through automation, and tie their efforts directly to business outcomes.
While this shift may seem at odds with the function’s behind-the-scenes origins, in 2025, product ops is increasingly expected to demonstrate value, expand influence, and drive meaningful outcomes across the entire product organization and beyond.
Measuring Their Impact
More than half of product ops teams (54%) measure their effectiveness through product team satisfaction, and 37% use collaboration metrics. But 21% have no formal measurement in place at all.
Productboard’s Take: product ops teams are too important to fly blind. If they want to guide the organization toward a clear product strategy, they need to show how the product operating model improves time to value, roadmap alignment, and team efficiency. Measurement is the foundation of credibility. Data is the backbone of intelligent decision-making.
Scaling Their Impact (with AI)
Only 7% of respondents report high levels of automation, despite nearly half citing AI as key to the future of product ops. Most teams are still operating at low to moderate automation maturity, relying on manual workflows even as their responsibilities grow.
Productboard’s Take: The next phase for product ops isn’t just about solving point problems; it’s about building holistic systems. Automation and AI can multiply their value by reducing manual overhead, streamlining coordination, and surfacing real-time insights across tools and teams. Product ops should be the architects of these AI-native workflows, not just passive consumers.
Driving Business Impact
Internally, product ops is well-aligned with product managers (67% prioritize this collaboration). But their connection to customer-facing teams is much weaker. Just 15% report full integration with Sales and CS, and both departments were least prioritized for collaboration overall (4%).
Productboard’s Take: Great products don’t happen in silos. To deliver real business value, product ops must connect internal strategy with external signals—aligning roadmaps with GTM, reinforcing customer trust with roadmap transparency, and integrating the voice of the customer into every prioritization cycle. That’s how operational excellence turns into business impact.
Where Product Ops Goes From Here
Building on these insights, the survey reveals growing appetite for product ops to become a strategic partner:
- 42% expect this strategic shift within a year
- 43% say AI and automation will define the next three years
- 28% see enhancing feedback loops as the biggest customer-facing opportunity
These ambitions mirror the journey toward Product Excellence. product ops has the potential to power the systems, rituals, and insights that make every part of the product organization better—more aligned, more customer-driven, and more focused on outcomes.
The Takeaway: Don’t Just Do Product Ops. Operationalize Product Excellence.
If your product ops team is scaling processes but not insight…
If you're aligning rituals but not strategy…
If you’re centralizing tools but still lacking clarity…
Then you’re doing half the job.
The best product ops teams aren’t just enablers. They’re multipliers—fueling speed, clarity, and customer value by reinforcing the habits and systems that lead to Product Excellence.
Download the 2025 State of Product Ops Survey to get a comprehensive view of where the function is headed. And, check out our recent webinar with Ross Webb and Graham Reed on “The Future of Product Operations: Empower teams with AI automation.”
