Summary
Product Operations builds the foundation for product and delivery excellence by reinforcing product strategy with metrics, infrastructure, business processes, and best practices. It brings operational discipline to large, complex programs, enabling product managers to maximize the value and outcomes their teams deliver. In this talk, Ivana Ng, Director of Product at Nava PBC, will draw on her experiences co-building modern, user-centered ProductOps and Product Management practices at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs, to show what ProductOps looks like in reality, and how it can level up your program.
Key Insights
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Nava had to onboard 185 people from multiple companies in three months to work on the CMS cloud IT project, nearly doubling their own company size.
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Product operations was crucial to coordinate a large multi-vendor team and maintain quality and continuity on a highly impactful government project.
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Government contracts require teams to ship software immediately while scaling rapidly, which demands strong operational foundations.
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Shared, government-approved collaboration tools reduce licensing headaches and improve productivity across multi-company government projects.
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Product ops involves defining processes, tools, and data experimentation to enable Agile, user-centered design at scale.
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Starting every feature with a product brief aligns teams on goals, success criteria, and rollout plans to maintain consistent high-quality delivery.
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Defining clear roles and delivery tasks early reduces interpersonal tensions and accelerates team cohesiveness in multi-disciplinary teams.
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Embedding success metrics and measurement capabilities into product development ensures data-driven decisions and ongoing validation.
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Running user hypothesis-driven experiments, such as simplifying document upload flows and adding targeted help text, led to a 12% compliance increase in Vermont's benefit application.
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Teaching government agencies product thinking builds internal capacity that outlasts contractors and sustains long-term improvements.
Notable Quotes
"We essentially had to stand up a mid-size company to deliver on this contract."
"Government expects us to establish large teams while also shipping software immediately."
"Product operations is the blueprint for rapid but sustainable growth."
"Every successful enterprise has operational functions responsible for better collaboration, increased output, more efficiencies, and higher visibility."
"Shared tools have a lot of benefits, including streamlining license management and enabling us to test out processes efficiently."
"Data coupled with user feedback helps product teams develop solutions that maximally improve the user experience and deliver impact."
"We start every new feature with a product brief that outlines the problem, how we’ll measure success, and rollout strategy."
"Having a shared understanding of roles really cuts down on interpersonal tensions during team formation."
"If we can teach government partners to be product thinkers, that results in impact that lasts beyond contracts."
"In government projects, experimentation is the process of developing hypotheses and validating them through user research and iteration."
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