The product ops ROI conversation every senior leader should have

Hey community 👋

Product ops is a fast-growing discipline, but how do you actually prove its ROI to senior leadership?

In our latest webinar, we asked that question to Ross Webb, senior product leader who has led product organizations of 200+ people at companies including Amazon and Just Eat, and Hugo Froes, who has built product ops from the ground up at companies like Farfetch and OLX.

Here are my four favorite quotes from the session. ⤵️

1. "Product ops can't be the last function still presenting activity reports and calling it value.” – Ross Webb

Features shipped, processes documented, tools implemented. These are outputs. Sales, marketing, and finance are all held to outcome-based KPIs: revenue, retention, and cost savings with a named P&L line. Product ops needs to meet the same bar.

The shift Ross is pushing for: From “What do we do?” to "What is the measurable business impact of what we do?”

2. "How much money am I saving, or how much money am I making? That's the simple question we have to keep asking ourselves." – Hugo Froes

Qualitative evidence – pulse surveys, team satisfaction scores, stakeholder feedback – won't survive a budget conversation. Hugo's test for every initiative: Can you attach a dollar (or euro) figure to it? If not, it's worth asking whether it should be a priority at all.

Bonus: asking this question early also filters out initiatives that don't have real sponsorship from above, saving months of building something nobody actually needed.

3. "Attribution in product is incredibly hard. But it’s not impossible. The bar isn't perfection. It's credibility." – Ross Webb

Drawing a causal line from product ops to business outcomes is hard. Ross's suggestion: Identify an outcome leadership cares about, trace it back to the product decision that drove it, and then trace that back to the product ops work that made the decision possible. Leadership can connect the dots if you give them a thread to follow.

4. "You're not defending your existence once a year. You're demonstrating compounding value every quarter." – Ross Webb

Ross and Hugo both advocate for a quarterly ROI scorecard: 4-5 dimensions tied to business outcomes, scored honestly, shared regularly. It puts product ops in the same language as every other function being reviewed, and builds credibility over time.

💬 Would love to hear from you:

• How are you making the ROI case for product ops in your organization?
• Are you tracking outcome-based metrics, or still fighting the "what even is product ops" battle? 

Want to watch the full session with Ross and Hugo? Catch the replay here 😊

– Emma