Business Ops at a product company

Business operations can unlock the human potential of any product company. Here is a quick step by step guide on how to make things happen.

I came to Nullgravity as a Product Manager 2,5 years ago. In the beginning, I combined the role of PM with the role of New Business manager. I was crazy about all these proposal documents: contracts, estimation forms, legal things etc. But on the other side, I quickly understood the business and operations inside the company.

In 2,5 years I built a Product Management department. In close collaboration with the design and development team, we shipped 4 products in different domains. We have worked with considerable enterprises in the finance sector, retail, telecom, and health care. And now, we are going to scale our approach to Europe and the US. (If you want to join us feel free to contact me).

In this article, I’d like to share my key findings and thoughts that helped me, and I hope my methodology could help someone to unlock human potential.

After the 4 years at product management and 2,5 years at Nullgravity I firmly believe that understanding of Design Value is a key for the successful developing of a successful product. I have figured out that the Lean Startup approach is possible only when you have an appropriate team, culture, operations and the same metric definition around the entire company.

Huge enterprises usually have silo, tight deadlines, scrum-fall (scrum+waterfall) mindset, fixed feature list, time, and money, legacy, and a lot of commitments.

Yeah, it’s too complicated. But no one said it would be easy. Everyone who works “with” or “at” enterprises perfectly knows that. The truth is small companies have the same issues.

But how to up and run a product? How make digital transformation possible for your company? I have a piece of bad news for you: if your business ops are broken, the chance to achieve success comes down to luck.

Here is my step by step guide I’d like to share with you.

1. Always start with Mission statement (5–10 years). Describe what exactly you are trying to achieve.
2. Make a clear Vision definition (3–5 years). Describe how the world will change at the point when you achieve the Mision.
3. Build Customer Journey Map of your existing processes to get a big picture.
4. Build a strategy (1–3 years). Pinpoint key milestones, and guiding principles or strategic filters that you will use for screening and prioritizing of future initiatives. For example, you can use Design Maturity levels or some principles like:
   - Product quality;
   - Operational efficiency;
   - Operational effectiveness;
   - Customer satisfaction;
   - Automation of core processes;
   - Decision making;
   - Aligning service delivery to the business;
   - Improving controls;
   - Simplifying operations;
   - Reducing delivery costs;
   - Business profitability;
   - Improving market position;
   - Growth;
   - etc.
5. Make a list of initiatives and prioritize them.
6. Try to figure out how the small initiatives today contribute in the future.
7. Understand how each initiative impacts the Sales, Product team, Design, Finance, Marketing campaigns operations?
   - What resources would be required for execution?
   - Define how you will change your strategic filters for the year 1–2–3. What
   - Less is more. Defining things that you won’t be working for the next three years. You can’t build everything you want.
8. Transform your list of initiatives into OKRs. Create the Northstar Metric — same metric definition around the entire company.
9. Build roadmap.
10. Don’t forget about the Rockstar team, to make things happen (Reach out to me if you want to join Nullgravity). Build a performance improvement plan for everyone at your side. Give them the same framework for decision making to increase autonomy. Build the mentorship program.
11. Make Business Operations smooth and precise. Synchronize all efforts of the different team’s department around the primary strategy.
12. Execute.
13. Be ready for Growth. Reduce time for the onboarding of new employees. Create and keep up to date internal frameworks, playbooks.

Here is a template of a strategy map that you can adapt to your needs:

http://bit.ly/3647Ij3

Here is a list of materials that I found useful to cover this topic:

WTF is Strategy?

Many Strategies Fail Because They're Not Actually Strategies

Design Maturity Model by InVision: The New Design Frontier

If you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to share it with me.
My telegram: @Hlib_H
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