Product Operations

Overview

You'll be the operational backbone of Relay's product team, designing how product planning and delivery works. You own roadmap processes, prioritization frameworks, product analytics, stakeholder communication systems, and cross-functional coordination. You're making product management more efficient and data-driven.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Growth stage (Forbes Fintech 50 two years running, 331 employees)

Size: 331 employees

Growth: Adding product ops means the product team has grown large enough that they need dedicated operational support

Market Position: Fintech product competing in crowded small business banking space—need to ship features efficiently to stay competitive

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Process Design (35%) | Analytics & Insights (30%) | Cross-functional Coordination (20%) | Tooling & Systems (15%)

Key Activities

• Roadmap Planning Process: Design how the product team plans quarters and years—OKR frameworks, prioritization scoring, stakeholder input collection, roadmap review cadences. You're creating structure so product decisions are consistent and transparent.
• Product Analytics: Own analytics tools (Amplitude, Mixpanel, Heap) and help PMs understand usage data. Build dashboards showing feature adoption, user flows, and engagement. Partner with data team on product experiments.
• Prioritization Frameworks: Build and maintain systems for evaluating what to build—impact vs effort scoring, ICE scores, customer feedback weighting. Make sure PMs use consistent criteria.
• Cross-functional Coordination: Product needs input from sales, customer success, support, compliance. You design how that feedback flows into product. Run customer advisory board meetings, collect win/loss insights from sales, synthesize support tickets.
• Product Launches: Design launch processes—release planning, internal communication, documentation, training. Make sure new features actually get adopted and don't just ship into the void.
• Tool Administration: Manage product management tools—Jira, Productboard, Aha, Figma, analytics platforms. Handle integrations, permissions, workflows.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Everyone Wants Their Feature Prioritized: Sales wants enterprise features, marketing wants viral growth features, support wants bug fixes, compliance wants security improvements. You're caught in the middle trying to create a fair prioritization process.
• Fintech Compliance Overhead: Product ops in fintech means dealing with regulatory requirements, security reviews, and compliance approvals that slow things down. You can't just ship fast and break things.
• PMs Resist Process: Product managers often prefer to work their own way. Getting them to adopt consistent processes and frameworks takes constant evangelism and iteration.
• Data Is Never Complete: You want data-driven decisions but usage data has gaps, customer feedback is biased toward unhappy customers, and sales input reflects their loudest prospects, not the full market.
• Scope Creep: Everything that doesn't clearly belong to someone else ends up with product ops. You'll get asked to run all-hands meetings, organize offsites, manage vendor relationships, etc.

What Success Looks Like

• Product team consistently uses your prioritization framework and roadmap process
• Launch process is followed and features ship with documentation and internal training
• Product analytics dashboards are used in PM team meetings
• Cross-functional partners (sales, CS, support) feel heard in the product process
• PM team says you've made their jobs easier and they can focus more on strategy vs admin

Who You'll Work With

Primary Partners:

• Product Management team (your main stakeholders)
• Engineering leadership (delivery planning, technical feasibility)
• GTM teams (sales, marketing, CS for feedback and launches)
• Data team (analytics infrastructure)
• Design team (process coordination)

What They Need From You:

• Efficient processes that don't create bureaucracy
• Data and insights to inform product decisions
• Clear communication about what's being built and why
• Operational support so they can focus on strategy and building

Requirements

• Experience in product operations, product management, or technical program management
• Strong understanding of product development processes and methodologies
• Hands-on with product analytics tools (Amplitude, Mixpanel, Heap, etc.)
• Experience with product management tools (Jira, Linear, Productboard, Aha)
• Analytical mindset—comfortable working with usage data and metrics
• Excellent project management and organizational skills
• Fintech or regulated industry experience helpful
• Ability to influence without authority across multiple teams