As product teams scale, the chaos doesn’t come from a lack of ideas, it comes from a lack of systems. For Kunmilade Adedokun, a Senior Product Manager with deep roots in high growth teams, Product Operations isn’t just an emerging discipline, it’s the infrastructure that sustains product success. She has seen firsthand how even the most talented teams can lose velocity without operational clarity. Her response? Build systems that empower decision making, enhance discovery, and bring structure to scale.
Kunmilade’s journey into Product Ops started not with a title, but with a need. At one of her previous companies, product teams were struggling with fragmented feedback loops, disjointed delivery rituals, and a growing disconnect between customer insights and roadmap decisions. Rather than waiting for someone to fix it, Kunmilade stepped in to lay down the groundwork. She began with instrumentation, designing dashboards that merged product usage data, customer feedback, and operational metrics into a single source of truth. This wasn’t about data for data’s sake, it was about equipping PMs, designers, and leadership with the insights they needed to act fast.
But visibility was just the beginning. Kunmilade focused next on standardizing product discovery and delivery. She introduced shared templates for discovery, quarterly planning, feature demos, and retrospectives all integrated into team rituals. By doing this, she helped transform discovery from a “nice-to-have” into a repeatable process that could scale across teams. “It’s easy to assume alignment when everyone’s in the same Slack channel,” Kunmilade explains, “but what really creates alignment is repeatable structure, shared language, and clearly defined decision rights.”
A big part of that structure came from the way Kunmilade redesigned stakeholder communication. She introduced decision memos, briefs, context rich documents that captured trade-offs, rationale, and alternatives. These memos were not red tape bureaucracy; they were savers of productivity. Instead of replicating decisions at each meeting, stakeholders could refer to a shared document, ask better questions, and move forward with confidence. She also formalized monthly meetings where cross-functional leaders synchronized on customer insights, roadmap adjustments, and delivery risks. These forums not only reduced rework but gave the product a stronger voice at the leadership table.
Crucially, Kunmilade didn’t see Product Ops as a PM-only concern. She built tight feedback loops with sales, support, and customer success, mapping which insights needed to flow upstream and how they should be captured. At one point, she led the integration of a customer insights tool that allowed frontline teams to tag user feedback by feature and priority, feeding directly into product planning cycles. The result? A 30% increase in feature uptake post launch, because the product was now solving known pain points, not just assumed ones.
Underpinning it all was Kunmilade’s belief in decision intelligence, the idea that better decisions come not just from better data, but from better context and systems. She implemented OKRs that tied product metrics to broader business goals, created health check frameworks that highlighted risk before it escalated, and championed dashboards that focused not on vanity metrics, but on signals of value and adoption.
In one of her most impactful initiatives, Kunmilade helped a company restructure its quarterly planning process. Before, each product trio operated in isolation, resulting in duplication and misaligned priorities. Kunmilade introduced a strategy-to-sprint model, where quarterly bets were mapped to organization level outcomes, then broken down into team specific initiatives. This shift didn’t just streamline delivery; it sharpened focus. Within two quarters, cycle time improved by 18%, and inter-team blockers dropped significantly.
To Kunmilade, Product Ops is product management grown up, a discipline that turns product intuition into scalable systems. It’s about elevating the craft of product by building the operational backbone that allows teams to focus on what matters: solving real problems for real people.
