The Complete Guide to Product Operations : Building the Function from the Ground Up, from First Hire to Enterprise Engine
Overview
Product teams don't fail for lack of talent. They fail because no one owns the system around them. The data, the customer insight, the processes and the tools that turn good judgment into good decisions: product operations is the function that owns that system. This book shows you how to build it. Drawing on more than two decades leading PMOs, analytics and product operations at BellSouth, Philips and Honeywell, where he built a product operations function from scratch and worked across a matrixed organization of about 1,850 engineers, Neil Rivenburgh gives you a complete, practical guide to product operations, from the first hire to an enterprise-scale department. Across 39 chapters, you will learn how to:
Make the case for product ops and write its charter
Choose an operating model and run your first 90 days
Hire, develop and grow the team
Design and integrate the tool stack
Run voice-of-customer, lifecycle and launch processes
Build metrics and dashboards people actually use
Support OKRs, roadmaps and portfolio decisions
Scale the function and put AI to work in it Every chapter opens with a Leader Brief for executives and closes with a Practitioner Playbook of step-by-step actions, checklists and a maturity check. Twelve appendices of ready-to-use templates cover charters, job descriptions, scorecards, metrics dictionaries, launch checklists and more. Whether you are the first product ops hire, a leader deciding whether to invest in the function, or a small company that needs a lightweight version, this is the reference you will keep coming back to.
Customers Also Bought
Details
- ISBN-13: 9798234255778
- ISBN-10: 9798234255778
- Publisher: Neil Rivenburgh
- Publish Date: October 2026
- Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.85 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.22 pounds
- Page Count: 416
Related Categories
