Free tools · Elle Anderson · andersonco.uk

The Product Ops Health Check

Twelve checks that show whether your Product Operations function is doing its job. Run it with the product leadership team in half an hour. Tick only what is true today, not what the operating model deck promises. Each check comes with the question that exposes it.

Insight and Data

A product manager can answer "how many customers did X last week" without raising a ticket.Ask: when did a PM last query customer data themselves? If the answer is a dashboard someone else built, score half.

There is one customer view the product teams actually use, and it agrees with finance's.Ask: name the two numbers that disagree every month. Everyone knows them.

An experiment can be designed, run and read by a product team inside a fortnight.Ask: what was the last experiment, who ran it and how long did it wait for engineering?

Discovery Infrastructure

Customer interviews happen every week whether or not a project needs them.Ask: how many customers did the organisation speak to last week, and who booked them?

Research is synthesised within twenty-four hours and changes a decision within the month.Ask: find the last research deck. What decision did it change? If nobody can say, it was theatre.

A standing panel of real customers exists, with consent, and teams can reach it in days.Ask: how long from "we should talk to customers" to the first conversation?

Cadence and Artefacts

Quarterly bets are written with kill criteria, and at least one bet was killed last year.Ask: name it. If nothing has ever been killed, nothing is really a bet.

The weekly product review looks at outcomes and flow, not status and velocity.Ask: what was the last review's hardest question? Status reviews do not have hard questions.

One opportunity brief, one strategy page and one roadmap shape are used across every team.Ask: can a leader read ten teams in an hour without a translator?

Enablement and AI Operations

A new product manager ships something that matters inside their first month.Ask: what did the last three hires ship in month one? Onboarding is measured in outcomes, not completed modules.

Every AI feature has an eval the product chair co-owns, a cost per interaction on a dashboard and a named person with the authority to stop it.Ask: pick one. Who can turn it off tonight, and on what evidence?

Product Ops owns none of the roadmap, none of the delivery tracking and none of the approvals.Ask: what did Product Ops say no to last month? If it was a team's request to ship, you have a PMO.

Reading the Score

10 to 12: you have an engine. Protect it from becoming a PMO.
6 to 9: good habits, uneven coverage. The unticked boxes are next quarter's work, in the order they appear here.
0 to 5: your product managers are doing Product Ops by hand, and your decisions are slower and dearer than they need to be. Start with insight and data, then cadence.

How I use this: with the whole product leadership team in the room, ticks agreed together. The arguments over whether a box deserves a tick are worth more than the score. The AI operations check is the one most functions have not caught up with yet, and the one that costs the most when it is missing. Repeat quarterly and chase the trend.