Kevin Tassi
on
July 22, 2025
3
 min read

From Support to Strategy: How Clara Scales Product Ops at Swan

In this edition of Product Chat, we sat down with Clara Chaume, Product Operations at Swan. Clara’s journey from customer support to a  Product Ops role is packed with insights on how to scale feedback culture, align teams around product vision, and bring operational clarity during hypergrowth. We talked automation, tooling, feedback systems, and how Product Ops can be a game-changer when done right.

How it started

Clara kicked off her career in customer support at Glady (Formerly Wedoogift), eventually becoming the team manager responsible for process improvement and team productivity. Her transition to Product Ops wasn’t a random leap—it was an internal move initiated by her former manager, who spotted similarities between what she was already doing in ops and what the new Product Ops role needed.

"One of the conditions for my move to Product Ops was to take the Noe training—so I could truly understand how PMs work before trying to help them."

She emphasized how essential that foundation was, especially when stepping into a role that touches so many facets of product development.

Shaping the role based on scale

Clara highlighted how Product Ops is never a one-size-fits-all job. At Glady, her focus was on strengthening existing processes and building on a solid foundation already shaped by previous Product Ops work and the support of Scrum Masters. At Swan, the mission is different—helping scale fast, onboard PMs, and strengthen existing practices with more standardized workflows.

"The stage of the company radically changes what Product Ops means. You adapt to different stakeholders, tools, and company priorities."

In her current role at Swan, Clara is embedded in the day-to-day operational fabric of the product team. She's responsible for identifying blockers across the PM workflow, facilitating better collaboration across teams, and ensuring product rituals and documentation scale with the company. It's less about maintaining existing systems and more about building new ones from scratch—while staying deeply connected to every stakeholder involved.

Working like a PM

Clara structures her work like a PM:

  • Quarterly roadmaps
  • Gathering pain points across teams
  • Prioritizing based on impact
  • Getting buy-in from leadership

Her work lives in the operational trenches: unblocking PMs, improving rituals, increasing team efficiency, and removing process friction.

"I don’t intervene on product strategy. I focus on what slows down PMs day-to-day and how to remove that."

A few recurring pain points she sees across teams include unclear ownership over product rituals, lack of visibility into who’s working on what and why, and misalignment between squad-level work and company-level priorities. Clara helps resolve these by creating shared documentation, clarifying roles and workflows, and setting up automation to prevent small miscommunications from becoming blockers. By acting as a bridge between PMs and their environment, she keeps the machine running smoothly—even when the company is moving fast.

Collaboration starts with vision

Clara made it clear: the biggest killer of team alignment is a lack of vision.

"Without a clear strategy and vision, PMs can't prioritize. Everyone goes in different directions. Dependencies turn into blockers."

She stressed the importance of:

  • Company-wide KPIs that cascade to squads
  • Transparent decision-making
  • Strong collaboration between Product, Sales, and CS

Without a shared direction, teams tend to local-optimize. PMs build roadmaps in isolation, squads duplicate efforts, and dependencies turn into friction points. Clara’s advice: start by making strategy tangible. That means not just setting OKRs, but revisiting them in rituals, tying work directly to outcomes, and empowering every squad to explain the “why” behind what they’re doing. Clear vision doesn’t just align—it accelerates.

Tool Stack & Automation Hacks

Clara uses a simple but effective tool stack:

  • Notion for content and documentation
  • Slack workflows for async reminders
  • Basalt for prompt creation
  • Cycle for Feedback automation
  • Dust for ad-hoc AI automation (Testing phase)

"The most time-consuming part? Chasing people and running rituals. Slack workflows saved me."

She’s testing Dust to see how agents can help Product Ops workflows and Product Management—from drafting comms to nudging teams or analyzing interviews.

Feedback culture: A must-have, not a nice-to-have

"As a Product Ops, you can’t launch initiatives if you don’t understand user pain. Feedback is where everything starts."

At Glady, they implemented Harvestr but failed to activate it due to lack of internal alignment and siloed processes.

At Swan, things are different:

  • Feedback is richer and more visible
  • Product culture is more mature
  • The team is actively improving the system with Cycle

What changed? Clara helped create clear pathways for feedback to be collected, understood, and used. That means working closely with Sales, CS, and Support to define what counts as valuable feedback, how to tag it, and how to trace it back to customer outcomes. She also implemented views and rituals in Cycle to make feedback review part of every PM’s week—so it’s not just collected, it’s acted on.

"You have to explain what a feedback is, why it matters, and how it helps the company make better decisions."

Clara believes that to build a feedback culture, Product Ops must first educate the rest of the org: not just how to capture insights, but how to see them as critical inputs to product strategy—not noise.

If she had to start from scratch

We asked Clara what she’d do Day 1 if she joined a fintech with a broken or scattered feedback system:

Here’s the checklist she’d follow—useful for any team looking to fix or reboot their feedback engine:

  1. Map the current state
    • Where does feedback come from? (e.g. support tickets, sales calls, user interviews)
    • Where does it go? (tools, spreadsheets, people)
  2. Identify blockers
    • What stops teams from sharing feedback?
    • Are channels unclear? Is there a fear it won’t be read? Does it feel like a waste of time?
  3. Audit roles & habits
    • Who owns feedback collection? Who processes it?
    • Are PMs expected to review it regularly? Are rituals in place?
  4. Clarify what counts as feedback
    • Align the org on what to capture (bugs, requests, frustration, friction, praise)
    • Train teams to recognize and tag it properly
  5. Build feedback rituals
    • Weekly/bi-weekly reviews by PMs
    • Dashboards or views for top themes, customer impact, and recency
  6. Only then—select tools
    • Choose a system that fits your process, not the other way around

"First, I’d audit the current process. Where does the feedback go? What blocks people from sharing it? You need to identify the root causes before implementing anything new."

Resources she recommends

"Don’t start with the tools. Start with the problem."

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