Product Agility

Antonia Landi: Product Ops Masterclass: From Inertia to Impact - Productized 2025 TalkInTen

• Ben Maynard, Ryan Lane, Antonia Landi

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Productized Lisbon is exceptional - and we’re honoured to partner with them for the third year running.

Welcome to a special Talk in Ten from the Product Agility Podcast, recorded live at Productized in Lisbon. In this rapid-fire conversation, we sit down with Antonia Landy about her workshop, Delivering Results: a product operations masterclass for leaders designed to help people draft a practical Product Ops strategy.

Key topics discussed

  • What a Product Ops strategy looks like and how to draft a first version
  • When organisations need Product Ops, and how it combats inertia
  • Balancing pragmatism vs dogmatism when introducing change
  • How Product Ops teams can evaluate AI tools to accelerate work
  • Predictions for product teams: smaller, faster, more focused


Guest bio:

Antonia Landi is a Product Ops practitioner with five years’ experience shaping product operations, processes and strategies. She helps product organisations become more intentional about the operational work that enables product teams to deliver outcomes. Antonia runs workshops and engagements focused on discovery, pragmatic change and building repeatable Product Ops systems that scale.


We’re proud to record from the world-class Productized conference in Lisbon - an incredible gathering of product thinkers, and an event we’re honoured to partner with. A big thank you to our sponsor, Bobcats Coding, for making this Lisbon series possible. Visit bobcatscoding.com to download their free AI economics guidebook.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Product Agility Podcast

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Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast where we explore the ever changing world of product leadership and org design, helping you navigate complexity and build better outcomes for your people and your customers. This week we're coming to you live from Lisbon for the third year in a row at the Productize conference where I'm grabbing 10 minute conversations with product thinkers, leaders and innovators from around the world. These quick fire chats are all about what's shaping our industry right now, from AI and product strategy to the human side of building great products. Now a huge thank you goes out to Bobcatz Coding for making this Lisbon series possible. Bobcats is a Budapest and Lisbon based digital product studio specializing in AI engineering and end to end digital product development. They're also on a mission to educate the market, exploring a new topic every six months and this fall is no exception. Their latest AI economics guidebook is out now and you can download it for free@bobcatscoding.com now here's your talk in 10. We are here, productised 25. I'm here with Ryan, the CTO of Bobcats. Nice to be with you again, Ryan. Great to be here. It's nice having a mixture of accents in the host. I do really appreciate that. And we've got quite a. Quite a soup. I think of different accents. Today we are joined by Antonia Landy. Hello. Hello. Lovely to have you here. Thank you for having me. We met briefly yesterday when you asked for directions. Exactly, exactly. That's the only direction you could have asked me for. I actually need the answer to. So you picked the right person. Your workshop is Delivering Results, a product operations masterclass for leaders. That's right. Tell us a little bit about yourself and the workshop you're going to be doing here at Productized. Sure. So my name is Antonia, contributing to the soup with my slight Scottish twang. I been doing product ops for about five years now, kind of before it started becoming cool, before everybody started talking about it. And my objective for my workshop today is to have people create a first draft of a product operations strategy. So, lofty, ambitious goal, but I think we'll manage to get there. Could you give us a quick overview of what such a strategy might look like, hypothetically? Absolutely. So broadly speaking, what we'll be doing today is really thinking about the future. So as an organization, what do we want to be known for? Do we want to be known for engineering excellence? For having data backed decisions every single time? Then we'll talk about what kind of product team would be able to execute on that Lofty goal, lofty vision. And how do we get our current product team there? Through product operations, which broadly speaking means what tools do we provide them with, what knowledge do they need, what systems do they need, and how can we support them doing their best job? What type of person are you expecting to turn up at your workshop? So the title says leaders. However, something interesting happens with product operations is that very enthusiastic individual contributors typically are the people that can move the needle quite a lot, even without the leadership title. So I'm looking forward to really having a mix in the room. Nice. I'm curious, with ProductOps comes some data which you have to understand. Has AI influenced your workshop at all? My workshop, no. Although I do think that the implementation of AI tools in how we get product work done is a great topic for Product Ops people and Product Ops teams, because they are usually the ones that have the most holistic overview of how we build products in any organization. And. And they are so well positioned to say, hey, for this little bit, let's use AI to enhance that, or let's use AI to make this less painful or do this slightly quicker. Right. So for today, we're not talking about AI. This might come up in some folks strategy, but I think it's a great topic for product ops in general. So I imagine that when someone's overseeing a large product team, that there's a wide variety of different activities that need to be accounted for. Can you talk about how product teams at different sizes have to do things differently? Yes, absolutely. So I think one of the things you will notice when a product team grows inevitably is inertia. Right. It starts to feel like you're wading through treacle. It's like pulling teeth. Like everything becomes just that little bit too difficult to be comfortable. Alignment takes forever. People aren't going in the same direction. Right. And that's when Product Ops becomes much more acute and when it really starts serving that purpose. Now, there are teams who get ahead of the game and say, okay, I've got four PMs, I'm hiring a Product Ops person because I do not want that to ever happen to our organization. What happens most often is that that inertia sets in. Things get delivered that don't are in line with the strategy, or things get delivered very slowly. People are burning out. And yet you are still not achieving your goals. Right. Typically that's when Product Ops comes in. Like a superhero to come and save a day. Always. Does it always work out that way? No, absolutely not. I think with Product Ops, what's important to point out is that it implies change. Right. If you are hiring a Product Ops person, if you're getting serious about product operations, change will always happen. Right? You're asking people to stop doing something, you're asking them to start doing something or to change the way they've been working for decades. If a company is not ready to accept that change, if the people within it aren't ready to accept that change, product operations implementations will fail. So when you're in your workshop and you're talking about how you're going to put the change in place and do you guide the participants through some of these considerations? We will absolutely talk about that. I think the two big pitfalls I point out in my workshop is reluctance to change. Right. Not being in a position to change. The other one is leading with dogmatism instead of pragmatism. Right. We all have our own beliefs of which frameworks, which systems we think are best. But at the end of the day, we need to be pragmatic about what is possible within our organization and what is most useful to our organization. Can you give a say, just a small hypothetical example of. So you have an engagement with a client where you're trying to transform their product organization. What would the first month of such an engagement look like? What would month three look like? Yeah, the first month is discovery. Right. I, I love Product Ops because it allows me to be a product manager to the product organization. So I need to discover what the problem actually is, what is most acute, whether we need to solve it now and how we might be able to solve it. And for that I have user interviews. Right. I will speak to the PMs, I will also speak to leadership, I will speak to other departments to really get a sense of what is painful, where the friction is, and then beyond that, we then really go into solution hypotheses and testing those solutions and then figuring out whether they've actually worked. So it's very, very close to the product management job, actually. So by running the workshop, are you then equipping people to go and effectively do, do your job? I would hope so, actually. Like, my hope is that we democratize access to good product operations. Right. I think we need to be quite realistic about the fact that not everybody has budget, not everybody needs full time dedicated product op staff. But we need to become more intentional about this organizational work that we're all already doing, by the way. Right? Like, it's not a question of do we start doing Product Ops or when do we start product Ops it's about how can we become more intentional about doing the product ops work we already do. I liked what you said about being a product person to the product organization. Have you experienced any tension when doing that? Oh, absolutely. I mean, product people are the most opinionated people on the planet. Right. I think this is probably the worst. I wouldn't say that too loudly at a product conference. This is probably the worst possible audience to do such a change, heavy role for. But I really think that that's also the beauty in it. Right. There's constant challenge, there's constant growing together as well. As long as there is a base level of acceptance and understanding of this role. And you. We're getting towards the end of the episode now. You were at the leadership event yesterday. I was. And what did you do there? So we were talking about our predictions for the next 12 months. Yes. What was yours? My prediction was that we will see the most successful product teams be smaller because it's easier to get them to focus on their big, bold strategy and because through the use of AI tools and better systems, they will be able to run faster than product teams of that size have ever before. And on that bombshell, we'll bring this to a close. Thank you so much for coming on. It's been genuinely lovely to meet you and funny that I know after meeting you very brief yesterday when I see you turn up here, I'm like, oh, fantastic. I actually get to know a bit more about you. So it's been wonderful. Ryan, thank you very much for your excellent questions. It's been a lovely little 10 minute slot. So thank you very much for coming along, everyone. Thank you very much for listening. We'll be back again very soon with another talk in 10.

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Ben Maynard

Host