Sara Marishah Steinberger for Product-Led Summit

Speaker: Sara Marishah Steinberger, Director of Product Ops, Target

Sara Marishah Steinberger: Hi, my name is Sarah Steinberger. I am a Director of Product Ops at Target. I have been leading product and product ops teams for the past eight years, but I've been solving problems with software in one form or another for essentially my entire career. Right now I'm focused on product ops, which is essentially product management for product managers and leaders. And so looking at how we can make our teams more effective. And that kind of coincides with a tendency I have in my career to hit a major transformation effort every 2 to 3 years. And so really, it's about sort of setting the next target for what maturity looks like and then guiding teams there through a step change approach um with the mindset of progress of perfection. So those are the things I'm passionate about. I live in Park City. If I wasn't recording this message, I would definitely be skiing.

Sara Marishah Steinberger: At the summit, I'll be talking about product ops within the product organization as a function that can help product teams and leaders work more efficiently and with a higher degree of quality, there's in a super standard definition of product ops in the industry. And in fact, there's a lot of debate about what it is or isn't or should or shouldn't be. So I will be sharing my perspectives and experiences on where I've seen product ops leveraged really to help teams function better at scale.

Sara Marishah Steinberger: Speaking from an enterprise perspective, the biggest challenge that I think product teams and leaders are facing today is rapid scaling in terms of investment in a product organization growing that team very quickly. without necessarily investing in a strong enablement foundation and enablement can come in the form of roles that can come in the form of tooling processes, training, coaching, you know, all of that. But without those things, and when you grow your product organization very rapidly, you're going to find that product teams and leaders get stretched very quickly and that things like, you know, dual track agile innovation, healthy discovery and learning loops might start to degrade. So, from my perspective, that's what I see as the biggest challenge.

Sara Marishah Steinberger: I think it's important for professionals to attend events like this just to kind of step out of whatever echo chamber we might have inadvertently found ourselves in. So that might be the company that we work in, even the industry that we work in, right? Like I'm coming from, you know, a large retailer who also happens to build a lot of software. It could also be the social networks that we develop around ourselves. Like those can also be self reinforcing. And so I think just stepping out into a different environment where you're likely to hear um from other people in other industries who might stretch or challenge your beliefs is really valuable.

Sara Marishah Steinberger: My number one tip for people working in product management is really simple and I think we all learned it in probably early schooling and it's just leverage the scientific method to identify a problem, validate it, formulate hypotheses and then test them. I think if product people are able to do that over and over again, what we produce is really going to provide the most value as a bonus tip. Just take care of yourselves.