Career Transitions: Product Management vs. Operations

Even the best tools in the world won’t help if you aren’t using them to their fullest potential.

We’ve hit product management to and from software engineering, UX/UI, and marketing. Today, I’ll share a couple tips around the world of operations.

Operations Managers -> Product Management

I’ve found operations managers to have a surprisingly close parallel with product management. At the end of the day, both roles are focused on solving problems that need to be solved with the resources they have available to them.

In that train of thought, if you want to transition from operations into product, you’ll need to take the principles behind what you do and translate it to communicating vision and strategy to your stakeholders (developers, marketing, etc.). Essentially, as an operations manager, you work with the tools you have. As a product manager, you have the option to create the tools your users need.

Product Managers -> Operations Management

Because operations and product share many of the same principles, just translated into different contexts, the switch from product management to operations isn’t particularly jarring, especially if you’ve been serving as a PM with a particular focus around execution.

To make this transition, you’ll need to apply the same processes you use to influence product development to influence operations development. So, instead of using things like Agile, Lean, Six Sigma, etc. to streamline development, you use them to streamline business processes.

Operations managers also focus more on business outcomes, cost savings, logistics, etc. As a product manager, a great way to expose yourself to this beyond the theory is to sit with your operations teams and see how things are moving. What tools are used? Why? Why is X process this way instead of that? Etc.

If you’re considering a switch from operations to product management management, or product management to operations, reach out if you have any questions! I’ve been at this for well over a decade and am happy to help and share what I’ve seen help and not help.