Katie Hudson | Head of Product Operations at PandaDoc
From Shopify to PandaDoc: Insights on building strong cross-functional teams, streamlining processes, and driving customer-centric strategies
Hi, I’m Josh. Welcome to a special edition of my Product Ops interview series where I interview Product Ops professionals to uncover insights from their day-to-day work so you can apply them to your daily routines.
My guest today is Katie Hudson, Head of Product Operations at PandaDoc.
Current company and team:
Current company: PandaDoc. It makes small and medium-sized businesses run more smoothly by putting document creation, management, tracking, and e-signing all in one place.
Size of your current Product Ops team: 3
Size of the Product development team your Product Ops function supports: 70 (this is the product org overall)
Experience:
Years worked in Product Ops: 4.5 years
Role prior to Product Ops: Before I worked in Product Operations, I was leading international partnerships across LATAM, Europe and Asia for Shopify. I truly believe the relationship building skills I developed during my time in international partnerships has been fundamental to my success in Product Operations.
Career choice & first big project
Q: Let's start from the beginning. What led you to choose a career in Product Ops? Was there a specific moment or experience that sparked your interest?
During my international partnerships role, I ended up working on a project that had me coding a bit given an immense shortage of dev resources available to my team at the time. This meant I had to step up and learn a few coding basics to complete the project on time and had me working more with engineers, product managers and designers. This exposure to more technical work definitely sparked something inside of me and it was a bit of a realization that I needed more experience and further exposure in these areas if I wanted to remain competitive in my career. Thus my move to Product Operations was actually due to a desire to up-level myself, become more technical and better future proof my career. I really enjoyed my roles in business development and partnerships, and I know that I can always come back to those skills but I was in need of a new chapter and challenge.
Q: What was your first big Product Ops project? How did it come about, what actions did you take, and what was the outcome? What learnings did you take away from that project?
While at Shopify, my first big project within the realm of Product Ops was assisting in a major reorg of our Growth team turning it into a matrix style structure to better emphasize and set our teams up for success. My manager at the time and I were the ones driving this important cross functional change, from the basics of team assignments, to rituals, its basic operating system, and all communication. It was a lot of change at once that we had to manage. From there, I acted as Chief Operating Office for 3 Mission (cross-functional) teams, where I was responsible for setting and maintaining the organizational rhythm of those teams, including 6 week cycle planning. For one of our Mission Teams I helped build a culture of experimentation which led to 250+ tests launched in its first year of operation. These experiment insights led to optimization improvements on key landing pages and accelerated merchant acquisition campaigns.
Defining your role
Q: We've seen Product Ops take on various forms in different organizations. How do you define the role of Product Ops within your team, and what specific responsibilities fall under this function?
My definition for my Product Operations team at PandaDoc is the following:
Product Operations is a multi-faceted function that sets the operating rhythm and works behind the scenes as connective tissue across R&D and the rest of PandaDoc.
It’s still a fairly vague definition, and I’ve kept it that way purposefully. We do a lot of different things day to day, supporting our teams as they need and as they evolve. But the most important piece in my opinion is the fact that we act as the glue or connective tissue beyond just the Product and R&D teams, but to the rest of the company as well.
Ultimately our mission is to influence and empower Product teams to be focused and efficient. We boost collaboration and productivity between PMs and other functions across the company to build high ROI customer centric products on time and at scale. I strive to have my team be the driving force behind our successful product teams, tools, and processes in order to deliver the best in class customer centric products by fostering a culture of innovation and product excellence.
We have 3 key pillars to our work: Systems, People and Tools.
Under Systems we lead: product planning frameworks, quarterly and annual planning, and partner with BizOps to ensure Product investments are aligned to our overall company strategy. We also define and optimize our key product processes, as well as process customer feedback and deliver regular reports for our teams to gain insights.
Under People, it’s all about our rituals (async and live), cross-department collaboration and feedback loops with our Revenue teams, Bizops, Finance and Legal, learning and development opportunities to up level our Product team, and general support our team with onboarding new members, and other special projects.
Finally, with Tools, we take care of the negotiation, administration, and renewals of our tool stack, ensuring our team is trained and the tools are well adopted. We also are always assessing our Product team’s needs and researching or exploring new tools based on our current needs.
Q: Can you walk me through your org chart at a high-level, describing how your team is currently structured and how the Product Ops function fits into your broader organization?
PandaDoc consists of Revenue, R&D, Finance/Legal, and HR. Our Product org is one half of the overarching R&D org. Product is led by our Chief Product Officer, who leads our Product Management, User Experience (Product Design and Research), and Product Operations teams.
Q: In the discipline of Product Operations, how do you define success, and what key performance indicators (KPIs) do you believe are crucial to measure and optimize? How do these metrics align with broader organizational goals?
One of the core tenets of my team is centered around removing not adding. So we always aim to reduce time spent planning, or doing a particular task etc. The more we can take off the plates of our Product team members the more they can focus on building and solving problems. So we look at a lot of optimization KPIs (time saved, speed to XYZ, sync meetings reduced, redundant tool tip flows removed etc) and CSAT metrics (satisfaction %) etc.
I love this! While reducing time and optimizing processes, how do you ensure that the quality of work and decision-making is not compromised? What measures do you have in place to maintain high standards?
We base everything on our OKRs in our Product org, so that is our primary way to see progress / improvements and measure how we’re working towards our goals.
We believe that by reducing admin / duplicative work and optimizing processes we can allow our team to focus on what matters most: product work, speaking to more customers, etc.
We also did a lot of work in 2023 to optimize our rituals (removing and reworking them), and reduce silos among our teams. Example: instead of multiple individual team meetings with our leadership to review progress, we transformed this into one slightly longer meeting for all leaders from each product area. This allowed us to ensure that teams were more aware of what was going on across our org (and company), and more informed about plans / progress etc to make better decisions, understand more clearly dependencies, identify risks / challenges better and more openly ahead of time, and have a more collaborative work environment where we'd more easily (and quickly) see crossover areas with teams.
Q: For the optimization KPIs, how do you prioritize which processes or tasks to focus on first? Are these tied to OKRs at some level - either within product ops or for the larger group of R&D teams?
It comes down to what is currently the greatest need for our teams and senior leadership. Based on our top priorities, time of year, etc.
We look at key issues, then work to understand what we are trying to optimize for. Then we determine our optimization KPI from that. But first, it's always the core problem based on a set of current circumstances / projects / etc.
Q: Do you have any core principles that you tend to abide by within Product Ops?
Yes, I have 6 core tenets for my team:
Simplify and Eliminate complexity - less is more. Product Ops aims to remove, not add.
Document all things - we are only as strong as the documentation we leave behind.
Evolve to meet the needs of the business - our team and priorities should change regularly to match the stage of the company’s growth and product strategy.
Relationships first - build trusting relationships with other teams to build the foundation of good cross functional collaboration.
Never be the bottleneck - Ops should be able to walk away tomorrow and the org can still run and operate smoothly. Minimize manual efforts and automate wherever possible.
Data driven customer centricity - Promote and foster a customer centric culture with data-driven decision making within the R&D org.
Q: There’s a popular way of describing the role of Product Ops as “PM-ing the Product team.” Do you buy into that description of Product Ops, why or why not?
Yes and no. Yes, because Product Operations heavily focuses on the core problems that Product Managers face and helps them by developing systems, and solutions to ensure they can be unblocked to build high ROI customer-centric products on time and at scale. However, we also serve the Product Org as a whole, and pieces of R&D overall too - meaning we have a unique bird’s eye view to ensure a smooth operating rhythm to keep us on track to our strategy, and ship the right product at the right time to the right customer.
Tools and technology:
Q: What’s your product team’s product development stack? (Which tools does your team use for roadmapping, product analytics, collaboration, deployment, etc.)
Product Analytics - Amplitude
Roadmapping - Jira Advanced Roadmaps
Collaboration - Miro, FigJam, Figma, Coda
Deployment - Jira
Communication - Slack
Meetings - Zoom
Q: What are some of the must-have tools or technologies you use in your day-to-day role as Product Operations (separate from the broader team’s tech stack), and how have they streamlined your workflow or decision-making processes?
My team loves to use Coda - it’s like Notion on steroids and you can do much more complex database management, automations, and knowledge management. We use this for everything from project tracking, to team databases, product planning, intake forms, note taking, and other documentation needs.
Morning routine
Q: How do you begin your workday? Are there any specific habits or routines you’ve adopted for your role? Are there any tools or dashboards you look at before jumping into your day? Meetings you start your day with?
My morning always begins with exercise. I’m not a coffee drinker, so this is the best way for me to wake up and be energized. If I have enough time, I’ll also sneak in a quick sauna session and cold plunge too. Then it’s a shower, back home to make breakfast, and then I’ll start my work day.
I recently got a walking pad for my standing desk, so I always try to get my steps in during my morning when I don't have too many meetings, as the best way to increase my overall step count and avoid sitting too long for extended hours. As I’m walking, my morning begins with a quick catchup and check in - the standard Slack and email check, and then I’ll usually check in with my team. My 1:1’s with my team always happen on Monday mornings as both of my direct reports are also in Europe, and we finish the week with a team meeting on Fridays to recap. In between and during the week, I have a 1:1 with my direct manager (the CPO), as well as our VP and other Directors of Product. I also touch base with key leaders within Revenue and BizOps too.
My role is very connected to our senior leadership team within Product, R&D and overall at the company. Given half of our company is now based in North America, my afternoons are usually jam packed with meetings, so my mornings are my focus time to get my most strategic work done.
My favorite tool to manage my to do lists, projects and general tracking of work is Coda.
I actually like having focus time in the mornings. If it were up to me, that's how I'd structure it too. It lets me do deep work when I'm not tired from meetings and gives me time to work on tasks from the day before. When it's the other way around, meetings control the day and I feel less productive. How about you? Do you like this structure, or would you change it?
Yes, 100%. Having mornings free allows me to start fresh every day and determine how I want to spend at least 50% of my day - of course the rest of that 50% of what I plan might go totally upside down after meetings and changing priorities. But I feel for people in PST because they will always start their days with meetings, which can heavily influence how they spend the rest of their day. I feel like with the time zone advantage in Europe, I have more control on how to leverage my mornings and better prepare for things.
Frameworks and practices:
Q: In your role, you are likely to encounter numerous decisions daily. Do you have a specific decision-making framework or process to ensure optimal outcomes?
First, if it takes less than 5 minutes, do it immediately. The smaller level tasks you can just bang out will not only significantly increase your motivation to keep going, but also tackle that never ending to do list. For larger tasks I always look at what is the most impending due date or what is the urgency of the task and whom it’s being asked by. Next, I ask myself, is this related to a key OKR for either my own Team or the Product/R&D team? If none of those things are true, then I’m not afraid to say no, or “not right now” in order to stay focused and centered on the things that 1) I am accountable for and 2) will bring the most impact.
Q: When a project wraps, how do you determine what to work/focus on next? What does this process look like for you?
My team and I are constantly in touch with various members of our Product team and key stakeholders across the company. Part of our job is having that 1000 ft view, so we often see broken links, upcoming issues, or general improvements that need to be made for our teams to work better, faster, and more efficiently, together. We are constantly asking for feedback, and ideas from those we work with which helps to fuel our backlogs. Outside of that we also take a questions approach to our team’s OKR process - meaning we are focused on the top of mind things (“Why is XYZ happening?” “How can we do ABC better?”) and then drill down to the root cause of those problems, and that usually determines our next areas of focus.
Q: With the multitude of tasks and responsibilities in Product Ops, how do you prioritize your time to ensure you're focusing on high-impact activities?
We focus on our 3 core pillars (systems, people, tools). We best support our Product team with their day to day work (insights, planning, goal setting, process enablement), while helping to remove distractions (ie. proper product escalation channels) and ensuring the Product team is learning, sharing regular updates and being held accountable (monthly check ins, quarterly product reviews etc).
Q: Do you use a Project Requirements Document (PRD) or equivalent artifact within the Product Ops function?
Yes we do. We have the initial one pagers in Google Docs as a quick way to write up a proposed idea to pursue, and then the formal exploration of that idea is done via a PRD in Coda.
Our 1-pagers in product usually follow a 5W's model to get buy-in for a particular problem area.
The goal is for the template to provide prompts to increase the speed of sharing new ideas and provide a snapshot of all foundational information on “what” and “why” we are building
Here’s our format:
TLDR + Hypothesis
Who - who is leading this project? who is mentoring / supporting?
The What - problem, high level solution idea, expected impact.
The Why - why do we want to solve / build this, why is this important for customers, customer impact, business impact,
The How - target audience, measure of success, risks/challenges, potential resources required
If there is interest / buy in - then it would move to a more formal PRD format / structure.
The role of data in Product Ops
Q: What role does your Product Ops function play in facilitating the use of data across the product development teams? Which data is your function responsible for, and how does that fit into the larger role of data usage across the teams you support?
We’re lucky that we have a Product Analytics team that takes care of all of our key product data needs. However, my Product Operations team is responsible for the insights we gain from customer feedback (feature requests, NPS, Closed Lost and cancellation reasons, etc). From there we build reports, and send regular insights to our teams so they can leverage it in their discovery efforts and building business cases.
Effective team collaboration & communication
Q: Given the collaborative nature of Product Operations, how do you foster strong cross-functional relationships within your team? Are there specific strategies or rituals you've implemented to ensure smooth collaboration between product, engineering, design, and other departments?
We are the connective tissue between Product and Revenue primarily. We’ve created strong feedback loops for things like Product Escalations, general ways of working, and other key rituals between senior leaders to speed up decision making when it comes to roadmap planning and tradeoffs.
Additionally for Product Escalations we’ve leveraged async Slack workflows that can only be triggered when certain criteria is met for faster and more efficient conversations especially when multiple members of our Product + Eng teams need to be involved. From here we take anything that requires a senior decision for roadmap tradeoffs in a biweekly sync with our senior Revenue and Product leaders. Both of these rituals were designed by Product Ops and they are also managed / facilitated by my team too.
Q: How does your Product org share what they’re working on across teams within product development? What about across the company at large?
We have a variety of rituals that helps us share our work at different levels of seniority:
Team Product sync - monthly
Progress Tracking Sync for OKRs and initiatives - monthly (senior leaders)
Quarterly Product Reviews - quarterly (senior leaders planning)
Senior Revenue / Product Sync - biweekly
R&D All Hands - quarterly
Company All Hands - monthly
Influencing without authority
Q: Product Operations often involves working with diverse teams where direct authority might be limited. How do you go about influencing decisions and driving initiatives without having direct authority over every stakeholder?
This is where my background in relationship building comes in handy. One of my biggest strengths is my ability to develop, maintain and strengthen my remote relationships and also build immense amounts of trust across the entire company. I work extremely closely with not only our senior Product and R&D leaders, but also those in Revenue, Bizops, Finance and Legal to ensure I can maintain my 1,000 ft view of things, and see potential issues, trends, and challenges before they arise and become problematic. The trust that I've built from these relationships is what helps me to influence decisions and directions not only as a Product team, but as a company too. More often than not, allowing people just to be heard by acknowledging their pain points, and doing the thing you said you were going to do, gets you 80% of the way there. The other 20% is all about being a really good collaborative partner, helping your stakeholder win and/or finding common ground on how to succeed together.
I’ve been here too. Remote relationships can be difficult without the usual in-person cues, nuances, etc. Can you share some specific strategies or techniques you use to build & maintain healthy remote relationships?
Take time to get to know your colleagues (virtual coffee chats, slack convos, ask questions). Take a vested interest in them as a professional (what are they passionate about solving/building, what are their core problems in their team, what do they struggle with / need help with), but also personally (where are they from? how did they get to XYZ position, what are they interested in / passionate about, etc).
We're all humans after all and not robots. It's important to connect with people beyond just your day to day work conversations. For me, this helps me build strong trust and positive relationships which makes working with people much easier.
After getting to know people, and have on-going chats with them (either recurring meetings, or just connecting in slack often) - I get a clear sense of what their issues are, and start to see how myself or my team can either help directly, suggest ideas, or make connections to help them win. :)
My thought process is always "how can I make this person's life easier" ? <--- the answer can take many forms, but I always just try my best to be helpful in any way I can. Some days it's acting as a coach or even therapist and encouraging others, or proactively providing positive feedback to share some warm fuzzies, other days it's seeing a direct opportunity that my team can help action, or knowing who else to ping int he company that could help or be involved.
Q: Can you share a communication strategy or technique that has proven effective in conveying complex information to different stakeholders?
When you need a decision made my go to is to develop a quick one pager that follows the format: context, problems, and opportunity framework. I find it’s the best way to share information quickly across channels, have ongoing reference documentation (and thus documented decisions), and allow you to get your thoughts down in a concise way. Senior leaders get paid to make decisions daily. But, they have limited time and bandwidth to do so. By providing all of the necessary context, information and other inputs, you save them time from having to get up to speed, or spend needless time in yet another meeting, and thus you will get decisions made faster. Remote is the new way of working, async comms are the gold standard now, and thus your digital documentation needs to follow.
Adapting to change
Q: The business landscape, especially in tech, is constantly evolving. How do you stay current with industry trends, and what strategies do you employ to adapt your product operations processes accordingly?
I try to absorb as much information around Product Operations as I can in a variety of different ways: podcasts, newsletters, articles, and through conversations with people I meet in the industry (ie. events, Linkedin, etc). I try to gain inspiration through platforms like Reforge where they share a lot of templates, and artifacts from other companies, and I started an internal Speaker Series to help to bring Product professionals from other companies to our Product team so we can learn what their challenges and successes have been like and most importantly learn how they work. All of these inputs help me to stay current, and adapt or create new strategies within my Product Operations team.
Process optimization
Q: In terms of process optimization, what methodologies or frameworks do you find most effective in streamlining Product Operations and enhancing efficiency? How do you balance the need for agility with the importance of maintaining a structured workflow?
My methodology is always: less is more, focus on removing rather than adding, and simple is best. I think Product Operations (and Operations in general) folks can get caught up in trying to design or craft the most advanced automated system, when in fact sometimes you need just the basics. If you nail the basics first, then you can look to evolve and increase your complexity. But most teams require a solid foundation and thus a more simplistic approach is the better way to go in my opinion. The less tasks or steps a PM has to go through to accomplish XYZ the more likely it will be done, and thus the faster they can work.
Building a high-performance Product Ops function
Q: What’s the #1 thing you’re struggling with related to product ops right now?
The right all-in-one tool to efficiently track all of our projects/initiatives, dynamically formulating our roadmap, updating our sprint estimates and tracking our OKRs while giving the right visibility to our senior leaders - that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Q: Have there been any hurdles in incorporating this role within the larger product development ecosystem, and how did you overcome them? What strategies have you found effective in gaining buy-in from the broader team?
Meeting people where they are - being upfront about how I am there to work with them as a partner and not be a blocker or someone who will inflict process and unnecessary steps. I really listen to their pain points, and figure out a way to best develop a solution to fit their needs. I focus on providing basic boundaries for them to operate within, provide resources/templates, and let them do what they do best: work in their own way. The key here is not to be prescriptive, but to help empower the Product team.
Do you ever find it challenging to get them to open up? How do you position yourself as someone they can share their pains with?
This relates to my point above about building strong remote relationships.
It takes time to build trust, and these kinds of relationships. But once you have it, people are more willing to open up.
I think to build trust you have to prove that you are trustworthy, can be counted on, you do what you say you're going to do, and always are looking out for their / their team's best interests. :)
When you have that level - people are more willing to open up because they know they can count on you / trust you.
Q: How do you think about expanding the Product Operations function in your organization? How do you think about assembling and developing a high-performance team? Are there specific personal attributes or qualities that you believe make someone particularly effective in Product Operations?
I would love to add more people to my team to allow for more specific areas of specialization and more embedded individuals to our Product Track teams to help more day to day.
So far I’ve built my team by bringing people from the Support team who are interested in exploring a career in Product. Support team members are some of the most motivated, hard working and knowledgeable individuals when it comes to our Product and customer needs - and unfortunately due to the nature of their job / team, they usually get stuck in the realm of Support.
In terms of personal attributes, I’m always looking for people who are passionate about solving customer problems, are great communicators, passionate about learning / growing (growth mindset), and are willing to try new things. They don’t need to be experts in Product - this knowledge can be learned on the go. So I really center on the soft skills sets and build from there.
Q: How do you (or your team) iterate on Product Operations strategies? Are there regular feedback loops, retrospectives, or mechanisms in place to ensure that the role evolves alongside the changing needs of the company?
We adapt as the company and Product team changes and grows. We recognize when our systems, templates or rituals are no longer servicing our team and are not afraid to act quickly to update and communicate the changes. We have regular feedback loops with our Product team through regular 1:1’s, surveys, quarterly pain point check-ins etc to determine what’s working, and what needs changing.
Q: Are there specific professional development initiatives or training programs that you've found beneficial?
Meetups, virtual conferences / workshops, courses, podcasts, reaching out to other Product Operations professionals on Linkedin etc
How do you leverage data to inform decision-making within Product Operations, and what role does data play in optimizing team performance?
My team looks at a lot of customer feedback data where we summarize and highlight key insights, trends, pain points, focus areas etc to help the Product Managers with their discovery efforts and building business cases for what should be added to our roadmaps.
Work-life integration
Q: Balancing a demanding role with personal life can be challenging. How do you approach work-life integration, and do you have any strategies for maintaining a healthy balance?
I’m extremely privileged and lucky to be living in Spain. So, for me, one of the reasons I have such a healthy work-life balance is because I left North America [Canada] (spicy opinion, I know). Moving to Spain was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. The pace of life here is different, and what people consider important here is much different than your average North American point of view. People truly live here in Europe, they prioritize time with family and friends, and your life doesn’t center around your job. It’s so refreshing, and should really be the mentality in every country to be honest.
While I know it’s not for everyone, having a remote job also really amplifies my healthy work life balance. It allows me more freedom and flexibility, and removes the distractions of office life to help me be more productive than I’ve ever been.
Living in Spain, means I am 6 hours ahead of EST, so my mornings are very quiet and is the perfect time to be heads down and get sh*t done. Given the nature of late schedules in Spain (we eat lunch at 2pm or 3pm, and have dinner around 9pm) this really fits my work schedule perfectly (10am - 7pm) as it means I don’t have to get up at the crack of dawn and can still go to the gym before work, while having an easy to start to my day (time to prepare breakfast, read a bit) all before opening my laptop, and then also still having time after work for hobbies, and enjoy time with my boyfriend and/or friends before dinner.
Product Ops at large
Q: What’s the biggest challenge in Product Ops today?
That every company, and industry has a different definition for it. The scope and realm of Product Operations can be vastly different depending on who you speak to. For example I’ve spoken to some Product Operations professionals who lead the Product Analytics team, or are also fully responsible for GTM activities and are either effectively the Product Marketing team as well, or have the Product Marketing team report into them. But I see this as a strength for Product Operations, that there are so many exciting facets to it, meaning Product Operations can truly fit into any organization and any structure.
Q: What's the biggest need in the Prod Ops space today?
More conversations around salary transparency within our industry to ensure our Product Ops professionals are being compensated fairly for our skills, knowledge and experience given the unique and ever growing nature of our craft.
Q: For individuals aspiring to enter the field of Product Ops, what advice would you offer to help them build a strong foundation and succeed in their roles?
Soft skills: Center yourself around relationship building skills - it will be one of your greatest strengths, especially in a remote environment. Be sure to also develop your succinct communication skills and bonus know how to work with people from different countries, cultures and time zones!
Technical skills: Focus on product development fundamentals - you don’t have to be an expert Product Manager, but definitely brush up on the basics before diving in.
Q: What resources or communities outside of your company do you use to stay connected with trends in the Product Ops space?
Communities
Product Led Alliance (Events + Slack)
Product Ops HQ (Slack + virtual meetups)
Newsletters
Podcasts
I’m also constantly creeping different Product Ops professionals' profiles around the world from different countries. I’ve built a lot of really great virtual relationships this way, while also expanding my own knowledge of Product Ops and how different it can look in various companies and industries. It’s helped me gain new ideas, inspiration, and appreciation for our craft!
Wrap up
Q: How can people get in touch or follow along with you?
Feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin. I love doing virtual coffee chats to meet more Product Ops professionals around the world - so please reach out!
Thanks for reading this special edition of my Product Ops interview series! I hope you enjoyed getting to know more about Katie and the Product Ops function at PandaDoc. If you did, please consider following Katie on LinkedIn.
Until next time! 👋
-Josh
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