For B2B products, the operations layer — the dashboard, the audit log, the invoice, the support escalation path — is often the product the customer actually experiences. The exciting AI feature is a bullet point. The status page is the relationship.
Teams that under-invest in operations end up with a product their early adopters love and their enterprise customers cannot deploy. The gap between love and deployability is paid in renewals.
Treat ops as a first-class surface. The boring parts are where the contract lives.
