Two Ways Product Ops Can Lead the Business
Insights from Ross Webb’s Product Team Success episodes on how product ops leaders can drive impact and save time
Despite being a relatively emerging role, product operations has quietly kept the trains running for years: managing rituals, enforcing frameworks, and bringing cross-functional clarity to chaotic orgs. And the role is already evolving into something more transformative and strategic.
The best product ops teams don’t just support the business. They lead it.
In two recent episodes hosted by Ross Webb, top product ops leaders across industries shared how they’re making that leap. Their stories offer a playbook for any product operations professional ready to drive outsized impact and accelerate their career.
1. Aligning Product Functions to Business Strategy
“Aligning product operations with business strategy is like navigating a ship through changing waters,” said Ross. “If your compass isn't pointed toward the right North Star, even the most skilled crew and the fastest vessel will end up at the wrong destination.”
Understand what the business really needs
The first step, according to Graham Reed, is understanding where the business is focused right now… even if it’s not where you personally want it to be.
“Are we focused on pure growth? On bashing features out the door? On top-down, founder-led decisions? That helps us plan where to focus our efforts, whether it’s streamlining the SDLC or improving cross-collaboration.” — Graham Reed, Head of Product Operations, HeliosX Group
This awareness also clarifies where product ops can offer the most value—and where it shouldn’t get involved. As Graham elaborated, “If you’re asking product ops to do first-line triage or act like a BA, that’s not product ops. You need to understand what your org actually needs out of that role.”
Evaluate ideas with business rigor
For Justin Woods, strategic alignment also means applying a more structured lens to product decisions. “Ideas are free,” he noted, “so it’s important to know which are worth developing further.” That’s why financial fluency can be a game-changer for product ops. When you speak in terms of ARR and cost savings, you can earn a seat at the executive table.
“Develop a weighted framework that scores ideas based on revenue potential, customer tier, and alignment to company strategy. That requires getting executive feedback. Normalize all requests to a common denominator: money.” — Justin Woods, Consultant and Founder, Roadmap Heroes
Enable, don’t decide
Alan Arnfeld emphasized that product ops isn’t there to make the final call; it’s there to surface insights that guide smarter decisions.
“We use lean canvases to help teams structure business cases and justify why they want to invest in a particular product or initiative. That’s fed into an executive-level Steering Committee, where we decide how far along the investment journey we are.” — Alan Arnfeld, Product Leader Consultant
This is where repeatable systems provide a lot of value. Alan added, “We’re building a library of lean canvases so teams can see what’s worked, what hasn’t, and how to improve their case.”
Build consistent planning rituals
According to Katie Hudson, driving strategic alignment also means holding teams accountable to frameworks. This is especially important during planning cycles. “If you don't have that consistency, if you don't have that structure for your team to work on, it's going to be chaotic,” she warned.
“Another thing to look out for are people who don't respect the framework or the process. They’re trying to cut corners or say, ‘Hey, I really need you to build this. Can you insert it into your plans?’ While there’s always room for exceptions, 90 to 95% of the time, people need to follow the proper cadence of planning and the process within that.” — Katie Hudson, Product Operations Lead, YAZIO
Otherwise, the system starts to break down. According to Katie, the more “disjointedness” you allow for in your process, the higher risk it has to just fall apart.
2. Solving Problems & Unlocking Impact with New Technologies
The other way product ops can lead is by embracing new technologies—particularly agentic AI. These aren’t just point solutions or one-off copilots. They’re workflow accelerators that allow lean teams to act like force multipliers. As Ross explained, “Product operations teams are drowning in data, but they're starving for insights. The difference between overwhelmed and empowered teams often comes down to one thing: how effectively they can harness agentic AI.”
Let’s explore the different use cases product leaders had.
Create holistic, integrated workflows
One challenge with the explosion of AI tools is that they often solve narrow problems in isolation. As Graham pointed out, the proliferation of AI tools is creating fragmentation across the product development lifecycle. Instead of stitching together dozens of tools, product ops should focus on creating unified workflows that save time at every step of the lifecycle.
“We take discovery, design, development, user stories, and PRDs—which are all effectively the same thing—and feed them all into one another to ask how much of that flow can we start to automate.” — Graham
Accelerate decision-making with AI copilots
Tommy Oakes sees agentic AI as a copilot. Not a driver, but a partner. While product teams are still early in understanding how to apply AI, Tommy believes we’re at an inflection point—moving beyond hype and into high-leverage applications. He points to process automation, real-time insight generation, and behind-the-scenes orchestration as critical opportunities for product ops.
“You're never letting AI drive for you, but they make a damn good copilot. Using AI’s insights, automations, efficiencies, and its overall influence across the many sources it has access to, copilots make your life easier and ensure that you're making the most insightful decisions.” — Tommy Oakes, Senior Product Operations Manager, D2L
By setting up agentic systems that surface opportunities, deliver status updates, and even work asynchronously while teams sleep, product leaders can shift their focus to the strategic decisions that matter most. These copilots help reduce cognitive overhead, standardize information delivery, and unlock the full potential of the product organization.
Turn hours of analysis into minutes
At FreeAgent, Lucy Pitticas-Rothwell partnered with data science to build an LLM-based chatbot that analyzes Zendesk support tickets. It’s not just faster—it’s smarter. Lucy emphasized that her team only uses AI where it meaningfully improves outcomes. “We always ask: can we help someone do their job better with AI? If not, we walk away.”
“Before, product managers spent hours each month manually tagging and synthesizing feature requests. Now, they can just ask the chatbot: ‘What are users struggling with in the mobile app?’ And get answers in minutes.” — Lucy Pitticas-Rothwell, Head of Product Operations, FreeAgent
That principle—using AI only when it drives meaningful impact—is core to Productboard Pulse. Rather than chasing trends, Pulse helps teams turn raw feedback into real product insight, using AI to surface voice of customer themes that would otherwise take hours to find. It’s a faster path to clarity, grounded in what customers actually need.
Get executive-ready insights at scale
Joe Alim uses AI for competitive research, leveraging tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT’s deep research mode to compare competitors in detail. He sees value in using AI to dramatically expand what one person can accomplish.
“The AI came back with a 16-page comparison plus an executive summary. I can now replicate that 10x for other players.” — Joe Alim, VP Product & Operations, Compt
Standardize feedback and automate planning
Javier Garcia-Alzorriz built a system that uses AI to standardize incoming feature requests, transforming messy qualitative feedback into structured, digestible formats.
“We created a Zapier flow with Google Sheets and ChatGPT to automatically clean and categorize new Jira tickets. Now, I can deliver quarterly reports that actually reflect consistent themes.” — Javier Garcia-Alzorriz, Senior Product Operations Manager, Camunda
He sees agentic AI as the orchestration layer. “It coordinates actions across market inputs, internal workflows, and planning cycles—many of which were heavily manual just six months ago.”
Product Ops is Poised to Lead—Are You?
Whether it’s aligning product teams to business strategy or deploying AI systems that transform how teams work, today’s top product ops professionals are stepping into leadership roles with measurable impact. They’re helping their organizations make smarter decisions, move faster, and build what really matters. All while accelerating their own careers in the process.
Ready to lead the change?
Sign up for the change management webinar with Tiago Leao (Principal Product Operations Manager at OutSystems) and learn how to drive product impact at scale. If you can’t make it on July 30 (8am PST | 11am EST), don’t fret—you’ll have access to the on-demand recording by signing up!
