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Product Agility
The world of Product Discovery and Creation is becoming increasingly challenging due to mistakes and missed opportunities that are prevalent in agile teams, large-scale Scrum and all other agile frameworks. History has shown that when organisations try and scale their product development to more than one cross-functional team, mistakes are made that cut short many chances of getting all possible benefits.
The route of this for many is the need for more attention paid to the incredible advancements in Product Management driven by hordes of professional Product People who prove that making their customers happier is not a pipe dream but a hard and fast reality.
This podcast exists to explore all topics related to Product and Agility and Coaching.
How do you marry the agile principles with Product discovery?
Is it really possible to have hundreds of cross-functional teams (or Product Teams) all working from an effectively prioritised single Product Backlog and a dedicated Product Owner?
How can you embrace continuous improvement and empirical process control for your product, people and processes?
Ever wondered how to overcome the problems people face when trying to scale the Product Owner role and how it relates to Product Management and Product Teams?
Baffled by how to define a product in such a way that enables Feature Teams (aka Product Teams) and why doing wrong means you will only ever be stuck with technical teams?
Scrum Teams are not compatible with modern product management techniques.
Want to know what Product Focus means and how the right focus makes creating a shippable product less painful?
Need to get your head around how to blend modern product management techniques with Sprint Planning and Sprint Reviews to achieve Product Increments that cover the entire product?
This podcast's original focus was on Scaling Scrum vs Single-Team Scrum and how organisations can reap the benefits of Scrum when working on a larger product but still keeping a single product backlog. We found many Product People liked what we said, and then the penny dropped. This isn't a podcast about scaling Scrum or the limitations of single-team Scrum.
This podcast is for Product People & agile advocates who coach or get their hands dirty with Product creation.
We promise there is no Taboo topic that we will not explore on your behalf.
We aim to transcend the conversations about a single team, Daily Scrums, Scrum Masters and the double-diamond and bring everyone together into responsible teams dedicated to working on the entire product to make their customers happier and their lives more fulfilling.
Come and join us on our improvement towards perfection, and give us your feedback (we have a strong customer focus, too), and who knows, perhaps we will discover the magic wand that we can wave over all the broken agile and sudo-products to create a more resilient and adaptable future by bringing the worlds of Product, Agility and coaching together.
This podcast has the conversations and insights you need.
Product Agility
From 0-1: Standing Up Product Operations (with no new hires!) with Denise Tilles - Productized 24 TalkInTen
Productized 2024 is our third conference of the year, and we’re thrilled to bring you exclusive insights from this world-class event!
In this special TalkInTen series, we sit down with industry leaders at the forefront of product and business agility, sharing actionable wisdom in short, sharp episodes. This year’s conference is filled with innovative frameworks, cutting-edge ideas, and real-world stories designed to help teams and organisations adapt, evolve, and excel.
Our second guest is Denise Tilles, co-author with Melissa Perri and an expert in product operations. In this episode, Denise dives into how to set up product operations from scratch—without hiring additional team members! As companies face leaner times, Denise shares how to unlock the hidden potential within your current team, optimise processes, and drive quick wins that can make a compelling case for future investment in product ops.
Episode Highlights:
- Building Product Ops Without New Hires: Practical steps to launch product operations by leveraging existing skills within your team.
- Quick Wins for Long-Term Success: How to achieve immediate results that make a lasting impact, even with limited resources.
- The Importance of Product Ops: Insights into why product operations are crucial in leaner times to ensure efficiency and business growth.
Denise’s approach shows that even without headcount increases, product operations can be a powerful tool for driving better decisions, improving product performance, and setting the stage for future growth. Whether you’re a product leader or a team looking to establish product ops, this episode is packed with actionable insights that you can implement right away.
Connect with Denise Tilles at denisetilles.com for more insights on product operations and how to evaluate if it’s right for your organisation.
Denise on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/denisetilles/
If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to leave us a review and subscribe for more TalkInTen episodes straight from #Productized24!
Use code PROD24 for 15% off Sheev Ltd training courses.
Sheev - https://sheev.co.uk/
Host Bio
Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.
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Ben Maynard
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Product Agility Podcast
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Welcome to a very special series of episodes of the Product Agility Podcast, broadcasting for two days, direct from Lisbon Portugal and product ties 2024. This year, we're bringing you more exclusive bite-sized wisdom with our Talks in 10 format, where we're going to be diving into actionable insights from some of the best and brightest minds in product leadership. And attendees this year are being spoiled with talks and workshops from the likes of Radakadot, creator of radical product thinking and Rich Morinov, author of the art of product management, helping us all find some joy in what we do. But it would be a pretty shitty conference if it was just two people. There are so many more people here, and we're going to be getting as many of them as possible on here to share their talks in 10. Now before we begin, a huge thank you to our sponsor, Sheev Limited. Sheev is the company which has bankrupted this podcast pretty much since day one. I want to take an opportunity just to share with you and make you aware we do some awesome stuff. Whether it's training your product teams or coaching your product teams with clarity and alignment, or you know just a simple thing, of actually making OKRs work in organisations, these are all things that we are very good at. So do head over to www.sheev.co.uk, see what we do and get in contact with us. Also check out the show notes for a tasty little discount code over any of our courses. Grab a notebook because the next 10 minutes are going to be packed with action tips from the best in the business. And here begins a talk in 10. Episode number two at productise24, episode number two in regards to the one the sequence in which we're recording them. This may not be actually how they're released, but I thought you might like to know inside peak into how these things work when we're doing conference casting. Because many of the times the people that were getting onto the podcast haven't actually done their talk or workshop yet. Could we just want to get as much content for our listeners as possible? And Denise Tillis is the perfect example of that. Your workshop today is not happening until this afternoon. So thank you very much for taking this time out of your morning to come and have a little chat with us. Love to. Thanks for having me. So you wrote a book. I did. I wrote a book with Melissa Perry. Yeah. So yeah, you collaboratively wrote a book with Melissa Perry, Melissa Perry who I interviewed last year at productise24. That's when the book launched. This was the introduction. It was almost a year now. The ground reveal. Yes, exactly. We were pushing for that. We needed a date to push for. Yeah. So you're here to kind of keep the message coming through nice and strong. So Melissa, they gave a talk. You're here doing a workshop. What is your workshop on? What's the title? Yeah, the title is zero to one standing up product operations without any new headcount. And it felt really relevant because ever since December 2023 when Spotify had that massive layoff Daniel Eck, the CEO in his long sort of explanation of why he created this massive haircut, was that he was concerned that there were too many people talking about doing the work versus doing the work. And that kind of was a dagger in my heart. I think he's talking about us. But I think there's a lot to unpack there. There's the agile aspect, I think, that we kind of get lumped in with product operations. But it felt like an opportunity to talk about the fact that in leaner times product operations is more important than ever. And that's when you really need to be mindful of your resourcing, where you're placing your big bets. And how do you really manage change well? So just because we're in leaner times doesn't mean there's less of a need for product operation. So ideally, yes, you would hire a new headcount. But in light of that, there are layoffs. How do we sort of get that going and create a proof concept that management and executive team point, oh, this really does give leverage. Let's maybe think about funding this headcount. So how do we put something in motion to really get some quick wins and make the case? So before we get into the workshop, and I've just thought of a few little extra questions I want to ask actually, about our previous before recording conversation on model as well. Could you share our listeners a little bit about kind of what puts you in such a strong position to be talking about this? Why me? Yeah, why you? What's your authority Denise? Yeah, how are you? Yeah. So it's funny, I started working with Melissa Perry in 2019. And that was my first experience doing consulting. Before that, I was a product leader, I built and led teams in the consumer space at Condé Nast and at a B2B SaaS company called Sision. And it was my experience at Sision where I came upon product operations, but it wasn't called that. So that was back in 2014. I had a team of about 10 product managers, tons of data and tons of revenue data, which I'd never been exposed to working at Condé Nast, a privately held company. We only saw engagement numbers. And that's kind of like doing product with your hand tied behind your back. So I was super excited to get all these revenue numbers, it was almost overwhelming. And we would get these numbers every month and like, very cool, revenue's up, but what's in here? What's the story? And I think it was hard to sort of tease that out with the everyday type of work that product managers do. And my SVP said, why do we hire someone to think about data analysis? I'm like, okay, I know someone who's great. She's much more experienced. We hired her, we created a little team, a strategy and operations team. And they were really this sort of ballast to provide us really good insights. They understood the product, but they were a little more removed. So they had more objectivity to sort of identify what the data was telling us. And they identified an opportunity for sort of an add on product that could be really appealing in the marketplace. So we did some analysis, created a hypothesis and we're like, all right, let's do this as sort of a back of the pocket product. It made a million dollars the first year. And that's not small. I think our revenue for my product line was 160 million. So we were like, wow, this is kind of great. We maybe wouldn't have noticed this. Had this team not existed. And this is different from like data science. These are people who are actually helping you think about opportunity. And so fast forward, a couple years later working with Melissa, she mentioned something about product operations. I was like, wait a minute, what is that? And she explained it. And the way she talked about it, I'm like, well, that's what we were doing. And I want to learn more about this. So started working with her on helping implement product operations at a number of portfolio companies, insight partners, a venture capital company, New York City, and really got excited about it, seeing the power and the sort of results it would deliver. And 2021, COVID happened, we're all sort of doing our own thing. And I said, I'm thinking about writing a book. Is that crazy? And she said, no, that's great. I'm like, why don't you do it with me? And then, you know, no response. You were slacking it. But a few of us like, you know what, let's do it. Because after escaping the build trap, she I think she was done. But we did it. It was a labor of love, took a couple of years. And so I think that's what gives me the authority to to co-write this book. I'm just going to take a box down here. Hold on. There we go. Box ticked. Excellent. What an amazing story. And I think this is one thing that really separates, for me, productized and product, particularly productized, many product conferences, apart from other conferences, the people that are speaking here and running workshops have done the work. And I think that sometimes that's sorely missing in some conferences. It's all theoretical. Yeah, it's theoretical. It's people talking about doing the work or talking about how they think they could support people who are doing the work. But here it's people who are doing the work. And I I love that. And this is I've walked in the shoes. I get it. Yeah, there's a huge difference. I mean, it's different to our listeners. It's different to me. And someone asked me when I was just getting a coffee like, why do you have the podcast? And I was like, well, actually, apart from it being a bit of a midlife crisis and eating a hobby. It's because it's a great way for me to learn. It's a great way for me to learn. I feel very blessed to be of this opportunity. So we, you mentioned about Lena times. And I think that when I thought about our previous conversation, we're having our operating models. Actually, a lot of the times when we were working on operating models in some of the large banks, it wasn't said that we could make more money. It was because we needed to save a ton of money. And we had to find ways to get an organizational structure in place and a talent strategy and a location strategy and all the right pieces of a Juke source that we were actually viable. It wasn't about kind of making lots of money. A lot of times it weren't in revenue generating parts of the organization. But we were responsible for billions of pounds worth of balance sheets. So it wasn't like there was no money involved. So what you were saying there about moving towards product ops without increasing head count and appreciating for Lena times, but also saying actually there is some specific skills that are needed in a product ops team around data analysis, not maybe data science, and a certain kind of mindset you need and certain skills that you need. And they were kind of rapidly running out of time. But when you're going to be taking people through in your workshop, making the case of product ops and taking them through step by step, but how do you round off some of those heart edges, which is if you're not going to increase head count, but you haven't gotten the skills, what would you suggest that people try? If you haven't got the skills, is that what you say? If you haven't got the skills, yeah. But you can't increase the head count. What kind of things can people try other than reading your book? Well, that. But I think I guess I would I would push back ever so gently that the skills probably are there. They're just not being tapped. So the way that we define product operations in the book is sort of three pillars, business and data insights. So the quantitative user and market insights, the qualitative, and then process practices kind of the operating model is the third pillar. So as product people, we all have, I think, expertise in all three areas, right? So there's got to be someone on your team who loves data analysis, there's someone who gets so excited about systems thinking, right? How do we unlock that? And how do we give them the space to sort of take more of a center stage and help the company and make the case? So those would be the three areas that you would want to think about who here could actually help us put this into practice as a proof of concept. So I think you do probably have the skills on your team. So there's a phrase, I'm not sure if you heard it, Robin, peated to pay Paul. Yes. So how do you avoid that situation where you do have someone that is super keen on some of a data aspect of it? But is doing something which kind of feel like needs to still happen about the data? How would you advise or help people? It's a great question. And we go over that in the in the workshop and sort of like, here's the ideal of how a product manager sort of thinks about their portfolio, right? It's operational, it's strategic, it's tactical. And then sort of this, the activities around that, what does it look like in reality is slightly different, probably more indexing towards tactical. But being really intentional, this is what this person will take on here, the things are not going to do. Here's the potential impact. But we feel our hypothesis is that by investing in this as a proof of concept, quicker wins, we can make the case to go faster, make better quality decisions, and make the case for either creating a role or thinking about maybe reallocating some of their responsibilities. You mentioned systems thinking earlier, and I think that one of the lovely things about systems thinking is it's understanding what it is we're optimizing our system for. And I think that sometimes I think we're very good in organizations and not indensing the long term versus the short term thinking that we have to focus on solving things now. We don't want to rock the boat now, and that may give us longer term gains. So I suppose the somebody advice could be that if you want to be exploring this and giving it a go, then what is you optimizing for? You just want to keep things the same or do you want things to improve in the future and be different? I think it can be both, right? You can have sort of some immediate quick wins, but there are going to have to be sort of seeds planted right for that investment in the future. So it's both. Yeah, it's balanced that short on the long term. Yeah, that's the balancing act that is systems. Denise, thank you so much for coming on. That was a super quick 10 minutes. It felt quick for you. Super fast. Good. Okay. Oh my God. No, it felt so long. Faster than the dentist. It was great. Oh God. Yeah. Love and love. Thank you. Thank you, dentist, the world giving us good teeth. If people want to find out more about you, where is the best place for them to do that? Thanks for asking. You can go to my website, Denise tillus.com. That's T-I-L-L-E-S. And more information about the types of companies I work with, the types of services I work with companies on product maturity assessments, product operations, sort of like, does it make sense? It's not an automatic yes. Let's understand. And then what could that look like for your companies? Some large companies I've worked with like Walmart wanted to set up a massive team right away. Most companies, I think, want to sort of add one and then see how we can make the case to grow. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. It's so nice to meet you. You too. And I look forward to speaking to you again at some point, hopefully in the foreseeable future. And everyone, thank you very much for listening. If you've loved this episode, do make sure that you hit the bell or plus whatever it is on the podcasting platform of choice. So you take this anymore of these excellent episodes that we're going to have coming out. Again, Denise, thank you so much for coming on. George, thank you for being such a great producer. And everyone, thank you for listening. We'll be back again very soon. Cheers.
