Talking Roadmaps Should Product Operations Operate at the Portfolio Level? | Becky Flint
Dec 5, 2025
Becky Flint, Founder and CEO of Dragonboat, brings her extensive experience from PayPal and BigCommerce to discuss the evolving role of product operations. She highlights the importance of portfolio-level orchestration in product strategy. Key topics include how organizational structure influences models, the need for shared data to enhance decision-making, and measuring the ROI of product operations. Becky emphasizes that processes must be treated as products for efficiency, advocating a mindset that accelerates collective impact across teams.
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Operating Model Already Exists
- Every company already runs a product operating model even if it's imperfect and informal.
- Improving it means evolving structures, roles, cadences and shared semantics rather than inventing from scratch.
Centralize Shared Services
- Identify shared services and centre them in product ops to avoid duplicated effort across teams.
- Focus product ops on strategy, cross-team orchestration, and customer intake rather than micromanaging individual PM tasks.
PayPal Sparked Her Product Ops Path
- Becky described getting into product ops at PayPal while scaling internationally and facing many cross-functional needs.
- International expansion forced splitting PM time and created the first practical product ops role to handle external coordination.