What Is This Thing "ProblemOps"?
ProblemOps stands for "Problem-Solving Operations": the practice of how we make change in the world. It's a system that teams can use to build a shared understanding and work together.
What's This Site?
This is a blog and newsletter dedicated to the practice of ProblemOps. It offers training, templates, and content related to the system that's been built around this discipline.
Who Is This For?
ProblemOps combines multiple disciplines together: User Experience, Customer Experience, Product Management, and Operations. This is meant to be accessible and easy. We won't use buzzwords, we will describe the essence of what we mean. No "UX" or "Design" or "Discovery" or "Product" or "Research" or anything that's interpretive.
This discipline is suited for UX professionals, business professionals, and systems engineering professionals. Anyone who works on teams to solve problems can practice the principles of ProblemOps.
The Author's Note
Morgan Denner created ProblemOps and runs this website.
I have taken my 12 years of experience to create an end-to-end systematic approach to teamwork. It's all based on the trials and tribulations I've faced while trying to do the same things a lot of people in the UX or product management fields struggle with: getting others to listen, gaining buy-in, building the right solutions, staying on task, creating influence, and serving the right needs to humans.
My career is a long and winding road. It started in sales and headed into strategy, operations, and delivery. Along the way I've worn so many hats: UX research, UX design, product owner, product manager, business analyst, project manager, agile coach. You name it I've probably had to do it somehow, somewhere.
I immediately sensed the gap between the problem-solving in academia versus the solution-driven nature of business. I've struggled and learned how to navigate it, like a lot of us do.
I learned one thing: that if you're not speaking the same language as the other person, you won't achieve the outcome together. The root of the work is trust and a shared understanding. It's not skills, or craft, or tools, or frameworks, or knowledge, or loudness in the room. It's human-to-human connection, and communication that matters most of all.
And so, when I train people, I train them in the art of building shared understanding and trust. I emphasize the need to understand others before you get others to understand you.
The ProblemOps system is something that UX professionals and product management professionals will find familiar. And that's intentional. It uses tools and methods from both disciplines, and a lot more.
Why Is It Valuable?
The key to our future is not just one single perspective, but combined perspectives, and a common language between different functions of the business. ProblemOps is a people-driven system first. Without human beings, we're not going to change a thing.
How Was It Made?
The system is created from the lessons learned in end-to-end experience design. Over 12 years, it's been lived and practiced in raw form. In the last 3 years, the templates have been used in practice. They continue to change and update based on lived experiences of those who use the ProblemOps system. The system maintains a change log to keep track of what's been changed over time.
What Do I Get in the Newsletter?
By signing up to the ProblemOps newsletter, you'll get access to the full archive of training and materials that have been published before and everything that's still to come.
- Books
- Templates
- Videos
- Discussions
- Podcasts
- Case Studies