Enabling Strategic Product Decisions through Product Operations and Portfolio Management (with Becky Flint, CEO of Dragonboat)

Jan 21, 2024

Becky Flint, CEO of Dragonboat and former Paypal employee, discusses the importance of product portfolio management and product operations. Topics include: the need for portfolio management even in one-product companies, the importance of explaining strategic decisions to stakeholders, the role of product operations in ensuring product teams deliver, and the importance of portfolio management for product operations professionals.

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Introduction

00:00 • 3min

Challenges of Product and Portfolio Management

02:44 • 17min

Using Technology to Assist in Strategic Product Decisions and the Role of Product Operations in Portfolio Management

20:01 • 2min

The Role of Product Operations in a Sales Organization

22:05 • 13min

Considering Cost-Effectiveness, Use Cases, and User Adoption in Product Management

35:13 • 2min

Focusing on Customers and Overcoming Challenges in Product Delivery

37:14 • 5min

Handling Strategic Product Decisions and Adjustments

42:19 • 1min

Enabling Strategic Product Decisions and Portfolio Management

43:44 • 3min

Becky Flint started her career at Paypal and helped build out their portfolio management and product operations functions before product ops was a thing. She's since moved through a variety of startups and larger companies before forming her own firm, Dragonboat, through which she hopes to provide tools to help companies manage product portfolios at scale.

Episode highlights:

1. Even if you have one product, you might still have a portfolio

People tend to think about a product portfolio, they think about a massive web of products, but even one-product companies may have multiple product managers working on different aspects of the product and these may well still need to be traded off against each other.

2. It's not enough to make strategic decisions, you need to be able to explain them

We're always told to create visions, strategies and roadmaps, but you need to be able to lay these out for a variety of stakeholders and explain them in ways that resonate with them.

3. As soon as you have product management, you have product operations

You may not have a Product Ops team, but someone is doing the product ops work. When you have a small team, maybe you can handle the work but, eventually, you'll need a team to ensure the product teams deliver.

4. All product operations professionals should be comfortable with portfolio management

Going further, product ops professionals who aren't comfortable with managing a portfolio shouldn't be in the job. Product ops people aren't babysitters for the product management team, they're senior, strategic partners.

5. ROI isn't enough to make good strategic decisions for your portfolio

Sometimes, you might not make big, strategic bets with unclear payoffs if you only use financial ROI metrics. You may also make bad resourcing decisions if you don't consider which teams are available when, and not taking account of bundles of value when making trade-offs.

Contact Becky

You can connect with Becky on LinkedIn. You can also check out Dragonboat. Alongside their SaaS software, they also have a bunch of available resources.