AMA: Twilio Sr. Dir, Product - Carrier Relations, Katie Cubillas on Product Operations and GTM

In taking an end-to-end business leadership approach to this role, it opens up multiple career paths. For example- if your goal is to become a product GM, this is well aligned. If your ambition is to be a future COO, I think this is a great role to dig into. I think it's also a great extension to leadership roles in customer success and GTM as well. I definitely see it as a choose your own adventure skillset.

Great communication and intellectual honestly are of the main traits I look for. It's pretty important to be extremely resourceful and confident in one's ability to make a lot with a little and to influence teams to buy into your mission enough that they want to contribute / jump in. I also get really excited when I meet people who have had experience in both product and GTM organizations and have a competence in translating across teams / tying both worlds together. It's pretty rare, but I see it being more and more critical.

Ultimately I define success as new customer acquisition, ARR, and realized revenue. However, I also think it's critical to establish strong feedback loops across departments & customers to understand how successfully you're building a connected culture that your customers & internal stakeholder teams feel good about engaging with. I say this because I've noticed that product teams can often operate in a fairly isolated way- remaining in a world of engineer-to-engineer and this can sometimes inhibit growth, learning and success. 

I've noticed it's pretty common that this role can be overlooked / under resourced. Instead, companies will rely on product ops being addressed via a team effort between Product Market & Product Management. I tend to think every meaningful product within a company should be set up as a 'mini company' within the parent company. In this way, I'd see prod ops more widely understood as a COO of a specific product / set of products.

It all depends on the size of the product and requirements scope. I tend to see this role as a right-hand to product VPs / GMs, so oversight of the product portfolio within that construct often determines the scope for the prod ops person. Alternativley, I've also seen the role built out in a way that's similar to product marketing. 

30: listen, learn, pull data, conduct cross-dept & key stakeholder interviews. Immediately get with finance to understand the product business model & resourcing. 60: Propose high / medium / low plans in alignment with revenue / customer acquisition targets. Get approvals across key stakeholders. 90: Start phased build against proposed plans. Run internal campaign across key leaders / stakeholders to socialize plan, timelines, feedback loops.

Data teams are critical partners to product ops. I've tended to structure product operations as the owners of the plan, strategies, operations, outcomes. We partner with data teams to inform strategies, measure ops effectiveness and report on growth / trends. As part of a product resourcing plan, having data team alignment / designation is critical. 

I've found it's been critical to feel competent in running a business end-to-end. By this, I mean I've focused on taking a 360 view regardless of where I've sat within my organization (be it product or GTM). Every product needs buy-in across the entire village to make it successful- GTM, support, customer success, legal, partners, product / engineering, etc. Being great at communicating with and influencing engineers, for example, is a wonderful trait, but success comes out of one's ability to translate goals & requirements + drive consensus across departments. The key tools I've consistently relied upon to help translate goals and build consensus / cross-department support are 1) a solid business model & 2) a resourcing plan. If, for example, a product team sets a certain revenue forecast without GTM owning the targets, support designating capacity, partners enablement, etc. it's a recipe for underachievement and conflict across teams. Business models / resourcing plans pull teams together to agree on targets and prioritization. Surprisingly, I've found that more times than not, these key assets are either missing or incomplete, but it's absolutely worth the time to partner with finance to establish a great baseline that you can use to drive more productive and actionable conversations. The whole goal is to get all departments collaborating together to row the same boat in the same direction toward your product's success. Lastly- I'd say it's critical to feel really comfortable being able to zoom out just as quickly as you can zoom in. This role requires that you can get your hands dirty in building processes and tools and running fault analysis (pretty much all the time), but I've seen too many people get stuck in the weeds at the cost of the bigger picture / vision / goals. Alternatively, I've also run into many examples where folks can stay too high level and big picture at the cost of timely execution. Walking the middle line can be challenging, but in my opinion, it's a very big part of being successful in the role.