Product Ops Assessment

Use this when a client needs a structured diagnostic of their product operations maturity — whether they're building product ops from scratch, evaluating what they have, or making a case for investment.

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How it works

1. You describe the client's org and their current product ops setup (or lack thereof)
2. The skill assesses maturity across 6 dimensions
3. It returns a scorecard with gap analysis and prioritized recommendations

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Prompt

You are conducting a product operations maturity assessment for Kate Makrigiannis. Kate is a product strategist and consultant. She uses this assessment to help product leaders understand where their product ops function stands, what's working, and where to invest next.

Inputs I will provide:

• Org context: {{ORG_CONTEXT}} (company size, stage, industry, number of PMs, product org structure)
• Current product ops: {{CURRENT_STATE}} (what exists today — dedicated team, shared ownership, nothing, or messy hybrid. Include any known tools, processes, or pain points)
• Known pain points (optional): {{PAIN_POINTS}} (specific problems the client has raised, e.g., "PMs spend too much time on reporting", "no consistent feedback loop", "tools are a mess")
• Engagement context (optional): {{ENGAGEMENT}} (engagement slug from knowledge/engagement-history.md)

Step 1: Cross-reference Kate's experience

If an engagement slug was provided, read knowledge/engagement-history.md for context. Also skim for other engagements with similar org profiles. Reference knowledge/services-canon.md for relevant service offerings.

Step 2: Assess maturity across 6 dimensions

For each dimension, rate as: Not Started / Ad Hoc / Emerging / Established / Optimized

1. Voice of Customer (VoC)

• How is customer feedback collected, routed, and synthesized?
• Does feedback from sales, support, success, and direct research converge?
• Is there a single source of truth for customer pain?
• Does feedback influence roadmaps in a systematic way?

2. Cross-Functional Alignment

• How aligned are product, engineering, sales, marketing, and success?
• Is there a shared language and shared understanding of priorities?
• Do cross-functional partners feel "in the loop" or left out?
• Are there regular rituals for alignment (reviews, demos, shared dashboards)?

3. Planning & Reporting Systems

• How does the team plan (quarterly? continuous? reactive?)?
• Is there a consistent process for roadmap communication?
• Can leadership get a clear picture of product progress without asking multiple people?
• Is status reporting lightweight or a burden?

4. Tool Stack Coherence

• Are tools connected or siloed?
• Do PMs spend significant time on tool maintenance or data reconciliation?
• Is there a clear owner of the product tool stack?
• Are there redundant tools or gaps?

5. Measurement & Effectiveness

• Are product outcomes being measured consistently?
• Can the team articulate whether product ops is working?
• Are there dashboards for key product metrics (adoption, retention, NPS)?
• Is the product ops function itself measured? (Only 79% are, per industry data)

6. AI Governance & Adoption

• Has the team adopted AI tools deliberately or reactively?
• Are there guardrails for AI experimentation?
• Is someone asking "does this make our system better, or are we adding noise?"
• Who is accountable when AI-driven decisions go sideways?

Step 3: Identify gaps and patterns

• Which dimensions are the weakest?
• Are there dependencies (e.g., can't measure effectively without a coherent tool stack)?
• What's causing the pain points the client raised?
• What's working well that should be preserved?

Step 4: Generate output

Org Context Summary

2-3 sentences confirming the organization being assessed.

Maturity Scorecard

Dimension	Rating	Key Evidence
Voice of Customer	[rating]	[brief evidence]
Cross-Functional Alignment	[rating]	[brief evidence]
Planning & Reporting	[rating]	[brief evidence]
Tool Stack Coherence	[rating]	[brief evidence]
Measurement & Effectiveness	[rating]	[brief evidence]
AI Governance & Adoption	[rating]	[brief evidence]

What's Working

1-3 things to preserve and build on.

Critical Gaps

Top 3 gaps, ordered by impact. For each:

• The gap
• Why it matters (business impact)
• What it's costing the team today

Prioritized Recommendations

5-7 recommendations, sequenced. For each:

• What to do
• Why now (dependency or urgency)
• Expected effort (Low / Medium / High)
• Expected impact (Low / Medium / High)

If Kate Has Comparable Experience

Reference relevant engagements where she's addressed similar gaps. What worked, what to watch out for.

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Investment ROI

Note: All financial estimates in this section are directional. Validate against actual org compensation data, tool pricing, and headcount before using in a business case.

For each recommendation in the Prioritized Recommendations section, add financial context:

• Implementation cost: Estimate what it takes to execute. Tooling licenses, headcount (fractional or full-time), consulting hours, migration effort. Be specific enough to budget against.
• PM time recovery: For recommendations that reduce PM burden, estimate hours recovered per PM per week. Multiply by PM count and loaded hourly cost. "Automating status reporting saves 8 PMs x 3 hrs/week x $95/hr = $2,280/week in recovered capacity."
• Tool stack TCO: If the assessment identified tool fragmentation, compare: current annual cost of the fragmented stack (licenses + maintenance time + data reconciliation labor) vs. estimated cost of a unified stack. Include the migration cost as a one-time expense.
• Payback estimate: For each recommendation, estimate when the investment pays for itself. Format:

Recommendation	Implementation Cost	Annual Value Created	Payback Period
[recommendation]	[$X]	[$X]	[months]

Bottom line: What's the total investment to move from current maturity to the recommended state, and what's the expected return? Express as a simple summary: "Total investment: $X over Y months. Expected annual return: $Z. Payback: N months."

This gives the product leader (and Kate) a business case, not just an assessment. Flag estimates that are low-confidence with .

For surfacing the invisible work a product ops team does, use the invisible-work-audit skill. For resolving role overlaps identified in the assessment, use role-clarity-facilitator.

Examples

Input

• Org context: "Series C SaaS, 150 people, 8 PMs, VP of Product reports to CEO"
• Current state: "One product ops person hired 6 months ago. Mostly doing tool admin and reporting. No formal VoC program. Planning is quarterly but chaotic."
• Pain points: "PMs complain they spend 30% of their time on reporting. Sales says they never know what's coming. CEO asks the same questions to 4 different people."

Output (abbreviated)

Maturity Scorecard:

Dimension	Rating	Key Evidence
Voice of Customer	Ad Hoc	No formal VoC program. Feedback exists in scattered channels.
Cross-Functional Alignment	Ad Hoc	Sales learns about roadmap from customers. CEO asks 4 people the same question.
Planning & Reporting	Emerging	Quarterly cadence exists but absorbs 30% of PM time.
Tool Stack Coherence	Ad Hoc	Product ops person doing tool admin suggests tools are disconnected.
Measurement & Effectiveness	Not Started	No evidence of systematic product metrics or product ops measurement.
AI Governance & Adoption	Not Started	Not mentioned — likely reactive or absent.

Critical Gaps:

1. PM time drain on reporting — 30% of PM time on reporting means ~2.4 FTE worth of PM capacity is spent on process, not product. This is the most expensive gap.
2. Sales-Product disconnect — Sales learning roadmap changes from customers erodes trust and creates misaligned expectations externally...