The Anti-Framework Framework: Building Product Ops to Scale 30 Dev Teams

Product Operations is a rare function. Not every company has Product Ops teams. All the teams I've encountered have been very different. Some share KPIs with SRE to deliver code to production, conduct UX research, include Product Analysts, while others even deal with support issues related to product backlog.

Tell us a bit about the Product Management Team and Product Ops Team at Aviasales. What falls under the scope of Product Ops?

Currently, at Aviasales, a company of over 900 employees, about 30 development teams, comprising more than 300 people, work on creating products.

Speaking about the ProductOps team, things are on a much smaller scale. There are only three of us, but we're a fully autonomous cross-functional team. To put it metaphorically, we're building tracks that help the company move towards realizing its Product Vision by setting up processes, various tools and metrics, and a product goal-setting approach.

From a structural point of view, our team reports directly to the CPO. Together with him and the CTO, we jointly form and implement strategic plans.

A common perception is that the ProductOps role involves getting bogged down in product routine: launching A/B tests, setting up product dashboards, conducting research, and even transcribing client interviews.Our ProductOps role is significantly different from this traditional understanding.

So you work more at the planning and synchronization level, rather than dealing with operations?

Yes, we are primarily responsible for high-level processes at the strategic and tactical levels, involving multiple teams or departments. This includes, for example, seasonal planning among all development teams, building and coordinating cross-functional processes to help teams work together towards achieving the Product Vision.

We try not to interfere with team processes at the operational level unless specifically requested.

Tell me how you selected the people for your team.

Each member of the team has a distinct area of expertise, so we ourselves can handle almost any service request on demand: conduct an audit, build a framework by request, develop a custom dashboard, and facilitate a strategic session. Each team member has experience working as a change agent (e.g., Scrum Master or Agile Coach) in the past, and we approach the implementation of changes in an organization systemically and fundamentally, rather than setting up product routines.

How long has the ProductOps structure existed at your company? Do you know why you decided to create a dedicated team?

The position in the company opened up at the end of 2022 and I was honored to be the first. The main reason was that the number of people and teams had been steadily growing since 2021, and even doubling at times, and the old processes could no longer handle such a workload, which led to impaired cross-functional collaboration. Through trial and error we formed our own Salo Framework, which we adapted to the company's specific needs.

To get started we chose the most suitable processes such as a Monthly Strategy Review and Quarterly Product Review and practices from various process frameworks. During the Monthly Strategy Review we track progress towards the Product Vision, and during the Quarterly Product Review we summarize the previous season's results and plan the next season’s work for each team. And this planning by season rather than by quarter was one of our innovations.?

How do people within the company learn that this new small team exists and what questions it can help with??

We have previous experience interacting with various departments, and quite often colleagues who we’ve helped refer others to us. Plus, we regularly remind people of our existence at different internal company events. For example, we have an All Hands meeting every week, where one team shares their results. We're also occasionally mentioned when discussing planning or survey results. In general, people reach out to us when they have process-related questions.

What are your KPIs and OKRs?

We don't have KPIs and OKRs as such in our team, instead we have an inspection and adaptation cycle that is embedded in the framework through a set of meetings and artifacts. It's important for us to understand whether or not we're moving towards realizing Product Vision. To do this, we regularly collect feedback through various methods such as anonymous surveys, retrospectives, and honest developmental feedback.

Does it help? Do people give honest feedback?:)

We strive to listen to what our people say because they're the ones who have to work with our frameworks and ideas first. For example, during one of our planning cycles, we received feedback that during long meetings, such as the Monthly Strategy Review, which lasted over 2 hours, people lose focus. So we started creating short videos to discuss Vision progress. In another case, we created a different process for teams building new product parts with more uncertainty in their product backlogs that included shorter feedback cycles and regular reflection on their project work.??

What are the most interesting and cool projects you've worked on recently?

Last year, we redesigned our approach to goal-setting, which became the core of the framework. In short, we redefined the Product Vision and broke it down into several high-priority, strategic directions with a lifespan of up to 1 year. These were then further broken down into smaller entities called Bets (bets), each of which lived for 3-6 months.

Product Vision and strategic directions are formulated and prioritized by the CPO, while Bets (bets) are prioritized by teams. As a result, both the teams and the CPO (who represents the Board Members) influence the priorities. Through regular inspection of strategic directions and adaptation based on feedback, with each step we consistently get closer to the Product Vision.

Because we’re very attentive to numbers, we turn everything that happens into numbers which live on a single dashboard accessible to all employees. On it, you can see, for example, the history of planned and completed tasks for use in planning, or look at the ratio of technical debt to product features, or even view a matrix of dependencies between teams to synchronize plans. All this can be viewed at the organization level or filtered by any team from the moment we started following the framework. This way, we can keep our finger on the pulse of the organization with just a few clicks.

Last, but not the least interesting, we're actively developing a framework for systemically working with change. We define optimization goals for the next year, think about what skills need to be developed to achieve them, and design conditions to develop those skills.?

It sounds complicated, but in reality, optimization goals allow us to answer the question: "What do we have to do as a team to be and to remain competitive in the marketplace?" At the same time experiments enable us to create a training system to achieve these goals.?

For example, it's impossible to become a champion in any sport overnight. You have to "work certain muscles" to get faster or stronger. This framework can work at different levels (e.g., at the level of an entire organization or group of teams). For instance, we may decide that we need to develop the goal "Focus on what's most important", and to achieve it, we need to develop the ability to determine what's truly important, be able to technically implement it, and develop the skill of helping each other. Quite often when starting transformations, people use existing frameworks (Scrum, SAFe, LeSS, etc.) and adjust the organization according to predefined rules. We, however, went in the opposite direction and built our framework from scratch tailored to our needs and requirements.

Wow! You seem to have a unique Product Operations team. You invest a lot in achieving your Product Vision at all levels. I like that your main customer is your CPO and also that he thinks not only about the product and users, but also about how people within the team continually develop themselves. The vision, people, and processes are the trio that makes a product.

It seems to me that the emergence of such a role can bring significant growth to the company during the scaling stage. When there is significant potential for growth, but processes look fragile and all traditional working methods have been tried, and simply hiring new people no longer helps, it's possible to invite change agents to the company to solve this complex issue.