Leader Spotlight: Bridging gaps through product operations, with Shailin Makhani
Shailin Makhani is a seasoned product executive with over 13 years of experience driving digital transformation across global organizations. Most recently VP of Digital Products at Santander Consumer USA, she’s known for scaling product teams by bridging strategy and execution, often through product operations. Her career includes leadership roles at Hilton, The Citizenry, and Fossil Group, with a focus on loyalty, authentication, and platform integration. She also led initiatives at a digital agency in East Africa and began her career in nonprofit operations, grounding her work in human-centered design.
In our conversation, Shailin shares how product operations fills critical gaps in modern organizations — clarifying ownership, enabling focus, and creating the structures that drive scalability and impact. She also reflects on the evolving role of AI in product work and how product ops serves as the connective tissue between vision and execution.
Connecting product thinking and execution
You have identified a gap in how many organizations execute on product strategy. Where do you see the biggest disconnect between product thinking and execution?
I’ve learned a lot in my experience as a leader, especially in leading product teams at Santander and Hilton. Hilton is where I learned the true art of product management, and the disconnect I've seen is where strategy lacks operational infrastructure. There is a significant difference between aspirations and implementation.
You may have wonderful, bold product visions, but without investing in that connective tissue — the systems and processes that allow the team to execute with purpose — they won’t come to life. That's where the best teams and strategies lose momentum. It's not that there's a lack of ideas, but a lack of operational clarity. If you don't have clear ownership over the process, it's easy to pass the buck. But if you empower a product leader to own that operational side of it, then your strategies will go far.
What led you to view product operations as the solution?
Over time, you can see that it's not a luxury, it's a necessity. In my 13 years in product management, I’ve noticed a significant evolution. At first, product teams were just focused on the product. Everything else was left to other people and groups. We were operating in this bubble. Now, product organizations need to step back, zoom out, and look at the bigger picture. We have to consider our organization, platform, customer, and more. All of these things matter; otherwise, our product isn't going anywhere.
Over time, I've seen talented teams slowed down by this operational ambiguity. Without the right tools, they don't have the right decision-making frameworks in place. You really need that scaffolding of product operations to allow the team to move fast without losing alignment.
This shaped the way I led at Santander specifically. I was given that runway to create some of these systems from scratch and see what worked and what didn't. It’s not just about building it, but constantly evaluating the system too. You can gain all this data on your product and improve it, but you also need to gain that data on your system that allows the product to thrive. It's not just about focusing on what you’re building, but how you are building it and how you can consistently deliver at scale.
Optimizing how product teams work
How do you define product operations? What is a picture of the day-to-day?
At its core, product operations is about optimizing how the product team works. It's the intersection of the people, process, and platform, so you can enable better decision-making, better execution, and faster delivery.
The PMO org generally tends to enforce the structure, but ops is more about removing friction versus enforcing ways of working. What are the blockers, and what are the issues you’re seeing? Let's take that out of the system and constantly evolve it.
Project managers track delivery, but product ops really thinks about how you are delivering outcomes and what systems enable you to do that. Scrum masters help think about the team flow and workload, but product ops moves away from the team and zooms out across the org to look at processes, visibility, tools, data access, and feedback loops. It's bigger than the team. That's what makes it its own function — and a necessary one at that.
What types of organizations benefit most from introducing product ops? Do you find it to be more for early-stage or scaling organizations, or more mature enterprises?
That's a great question. I’ve recently become a consultant and created an advisory focused on scaling and mature organizations. With product ops, I’ve found that if you bring it into small, early-stage startups, the cost of that structure is going to outweigh the benefit. You really want to move fast when you're in that young of a company, so it’s usually not a good fit yet.
However, if you're at an organization where you've hit a certain level of complexity, such as multiple product lines or moving toward being global, product ops is essential. It reduces so much operational drag, helps you scale, and provides clarity across the organization. That said, I think even small teams should consider and will benefit from product ops thinking — building things with repeatability and a larger vision in mind.
Are there any other indicators that an organization is ready for a dedicated product ops team?
When your product managers are constantly sitting in meetings and aren’t focused on outcomes, and when your roadmaps are disconnected from your company vision. A good indicator is if you're working on things that never see the light of day because of a lack of alignment or priorities constantly shifting. Or, if you’re working on the wrong things and you're delivering things that aren't moving the needle. That’s where you start to see decision-making become more political and performative instead of productive.
With those signals, that’s when you need to rethink how your product organization is run, and that's where you should either create or empower a product ops team or mindset.
The visibility that product operations creates
You've described product ops as the connective tissue between business and technology. How does it close the ‘how’ vs. ‘why’ gap that often exists between the C-suite and engineering leadership?
Leaders care about the “why,” the outcomes, and the vision. That's what they're meant to do, while teams focus on the “how” — what to build and how to deliver it. Product ops puts the right scaffolding in place to ensure that the strategy is flowing down and the insights are flowing up. There's a synergy between the two. It provides clarity, most importantly, about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how you’re going to do it.
Key features that a product ops person or organization implements are consistent frameworks around roadmapping and prioritization. They’re pulling the right data so that everybody is making decisions based on the same context. Nobody's in isolation — there are no silos. The data is telling the story across the organization.
Product ops also creates visibility via things like standardized dashboards, metrics, and tooling. Not just one team is using these tools, but the entire company is creating a consistent and repeatable framework. Product ops also ensures that teams and executives are speaking the same language, creating rituals around that, and coming together. That’s a crucial role, whether through feedback loops or consistent meetings. That way, leadership isn't chasing down the team, and the team isn't wondering what leadership is doing.
Along those lines, modern PMs need to solve not only for the end user but for the organization itself, the business at large. Can you talk about that?
Modern product leaders right now need to think of themselves as ecosystem architects. You're not just delivering these delightful user experiences anymore. You have to design solutions for the business that are sustainable, that you can scale, and that you can monetize. This means understanding your internal constraints, operational realities, and any deficiencies in your team. These are all things that are going to prevent you from being able to sustain the products you're building.
If you're building this product that's beautiful but is burdensome to maintain, that's not success. You have to design for value across the entire system, your user, your business, and your platform. That's the shift I'm seeing.
How do you help product leaders think beyond features and roadmaps, and consider internal systems, teams, and other decision-making structures to influence outcomes?
The biggest unlock is that every feature you build sits in a system, and that system determines the success of the product. Instead of jumping to what's next on the roadmap, you have to push leaders to think about how these decisions are being made and how to measure success. What's slowing things down? Remember, our job is to remove friction. Teams need to get out of their own way, not just in terms of output, but also in the flow of decisions that get them there. Is the feedback reaching the right people? Do you have a clean intake process? Are our tools supporting the way you work?
A lot of times, it’s easy to add noise to things. We think we’re cleaning things up, but we’re not. You add more tools, for example, that aren't doing what you need them to do. Eliminating those distraction points creates that synergy that I think is so important. Further, the idea is to help leaders shift away from that mindset of asking, “What are we building?” and lean into, “How are we operating?” If you have a healthy system, your features and products will follow.
Leveraging AI without fear
With AI accelerating automation, where do you think human PMs provide the most enduring value, and how can they stay ahead?
This is the big question I've been trying to answer over the past year. The AI wave hit us fast, and there is a fear in the product and tech community about being replaced. After I've thought about it a lot, I don't think that's true for product leaders or product managers. There are so many things that AI is not going to replace. As humans, we can judge and have empathy. We build a narrative in context that matters. While AI can suggest options, it can't weigh these trade-offs for you in this complex environment.
AI can surface all these insights, but it's not going to tell the story that unites all of our stakeholders around a mission or shared goal. Human product managers really shine where it's messy in the middle and where there isn't always a clear answer. PMs bring a lot of clarity to this real-world complexity. There's nuance to everything in product, even within something like team dynamics. AI can't understand what's going on with teams on a human level and who shines where. That's what we have to think about constantly.
Is there anything product professionals need to do to future-proof their careers?
The most successful product managers will know how to leverage AI and not fear it. What are the tools that will allow you to build and uphold your systems? How will it help you move you and your organization faster? What is the data that AI is going to bring to the forefront and the insights it's going to provide? It's going to give us deep insights that we haven't seen yet. The data that it can leverage is going to change the game. Leverage AI for that purpose. The truly data-driven product managers will thrive in that.
Also, learn how to be a good storyteller and align leadership on the what, why, and how. Learn how to move fluidly between strategy and execution. You can't have your head in one place or the other anymore. Lastly, understand how to solve problems for users and for the organization. You have to remain anchored in clarity, so your end goal is constantly asking, “What problems are we solving? Who is benefiting?” Providing that clarity across the board – that's timeless in product.