How Product People Established Product Operations and Cut Research Recruitment Time from 14 Days to 5

Our Client

Our client is a European B2B platform for on-the-road payment solutions. Founded in 1934, the company serves around 400,000 commercial customers across more than 50 countries. Customers use its fuel and service cards to pay for fuel, electric-vehicle charging, tolls, and vehicle services.

The digital product team works on the Cockpit customer portal, a mobile app, and software for fleet, transportation, and cost management. Its customers range from sole proprietors with one vehicle to logistics operators with thousands of vehicles.

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The Engagement: Establish Product Operations and Scale Customer Research

Product People helped establish its first Product Operations function, giving product managers a faster, repeatable way to recruit customers for research and providing product leaders with a roadmap for improving communication, processes, and product decisions.

The engagement focused first on making customer research easier to conduct. In parallel, Product People defined the role of Product Operations, introduced product management templates and workbooks, and proposed new structures for communication and cross-functional decisions.

A Fast Start: Prioritizing Customer Recruitment

Interviews with 15 product managers identified customer recruitment as their biggest challenge. Product People made this the first priority, building a process that allowed product managers to focus on discovery while Product Operations supported participant outreach and scheduling.

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Initiative 01: Faster, Scalable Customer Research Recruitment

The opportunity:

• Our client recognized an opportunity to make customer insight a more consistent part of product decisions, validation, and hypothesis testing.
• Product managers used several ways to find participants, including personal networks and support from sales colleagues. A shared process would make customer research more accessible across the product organization.
• Generic recruitment platforms such as UserTesting did not reliably provide the specific customer profiles they needed.
• Customer information was distributed across the company’s customer relationship management system, data warehouse, and other platforms. This created an opportunity to introduce a process for capturing explicit research consent under EU data privacy requirements (GDPR).
• The digital product organization needed a scalable outreach approach that did not depend on direct access to an email campaign tool.

What changed:

• Connected product managers with relevant customers. Product People identified customers who matched the target participant criteria, created outreach messaging, and included scheduling links so participants could book interviews automatically.
• Reduced manual outreach work by 95%. Product People learned Microsoft Power Automate, a workflow automation platform, and built an automation capable of reaching more than 1,000 contacts at once.‍
• Introduced explicit GDPR research consent capture. Product People worked with Legal and Compliance to draft consent policies and include them in customer outreach.‍
• Gave product managers a dependable path to customer interviews. A Product Operations request and scheduling process allowed product managers to submit participant requirements and receive interviews directly on their calendars.‍
• Created a growing pool of customers who had consented to research. Two email campaigns run with Marketing captured both research consent and participant profiles, giving our client a pool of people it could contact for future research.

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Initiative 02: Establishing the Product Operations Foundation

The opportunity:

• As the first team to establish Product Operations at our client, Product People had an opportunity to define where the function could support the organization beyond customer recruitment.
• Product managers were transitioning toward a more product-led organization and needed shared practices, templates, and decision-making structures.

What changed:

• Identified five areas where Product Operations could provide support. Product People mapped the product development lifecycle, documented product managers’ challenges at each stage, and identified areas for improvement.
• ‍Prioritized Product Operations activities according to impact and effort. The team defined the work needed to address each area, grouped it into initiatives, and identified the highest-impact activities.‍
• Translated the priorities into a 30-, 60-, and 90-day action plan. The plan defined action items for executing the highest-impact initiatives.‍
• Made product management practices easier to adopt consistently. Product People created templates and workbooks that product managers could use at different stages of product development.‍
• Secured leadership sign-off on a proposed communication and meeting structure. Product People mapped their decision structure and used it to design a proposal intended to streamline cross-functional decision-making. Stream leads and the VP of Product signed off on the proposal.

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Initiative 03: Creating a Shared Roadmapping Approach

The opportunity:

• Product teams created roadmaps in Figma and Excel spreadsheets, which required manual work.
• We saw an opportunity to give leadership a faster way to see dependencies and team achievements.
• A shared approach would make cross-team dependencies easier to surface.

What changed:

• Defined our client's roadmapping requirements. Product People interviewed product managers and gathered leadership’s needs to understand what the organization required from a roadmapping tool.
• Narrowed the options to Productboard and Jira Product Discovery. The team demonstrated the tools, ran a proof of concept with product managers, and used an anonymous survey to understand potential adoption.

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Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

💡 Reduced time-to-interview from 14 days to five by building a scalable research process for product managers.

💡Reduced manual outreach work by 95% with an automation capable of reaching more than 1,000 contacts at once.

💡 Secured sign-off from stream leads and the VP of Product on a shared communication and meeting structure.

💡 Established their first Product Operations function and created a 3-, 6-, and 9-month plan for prioritized initiatives.