Product ops is the connective tissue between what the team ships and what actually happens in the field. It rarely gets a clean job description, which is exactly why it gets neglected until something snaps and everyone suddenly wishes it had existed all along.

Close the loop between users and the roadmap

Feedback arrives through support, sales, and the founder's inbox, and most of it dies there. Product ops builds the pipeline that turns scattered signal into something the product team can actually act on, so the roadmap is shaped by what customers keep saying rather than by whoever complained most loudly last week.

Make the invisible measurable

You cannot improve what you cannot see. Product ops sets up the dashboards, the definitions, and the rituals that show the team what is really going on. When everyone argues from the same numbers, the meetings get shorter and the decisions get better.

The product team ships. Product ops makes sure they are shipping the right thing.

Keep the machine running

Release checklists, feedback triage, cross-team handoffs, launch coordination. Unglamorous work that keeps everything else from grinding to a halt, and that nobody notices until it stops happening.

Signs you need it:

Feedback disappears into inboxes and never reaches the roadmap
Nobody agrees on what to build next, or why
Launches feel chaotic every single time, as if it were the first one

Where it usually starts

Most teams back into product ops. Someone, often an operator or an early product manager, gets tired of the chaos and starts building the pipeline and the dashboards on the side. Name that work, give it real time, and it quietly becomes one of the highest-leverage roles in the company.