Episode 83: Driving Portfolio Management with Becky Flint
Melissa welcomes Becky Flint to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Becky is the Founder and CEO of Dragonboat, the responsive portfolio platform for product and technology leaders, and is an expert in outcome-focused product practice and operations. Becky joins Melissa to discuss how she recognized the need for a portfolio management tool like Dragonboat, why portfolio management should be adopted by any size team, common pitfalls in early portfolio management, why it’s the next iteration of agile, and how to implement a portfolio management practice into an organization.
Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Becky talk about:
Becky’s journey into product and how Dragonboat came about.
Portfolio management is not just for large companies or about how you create a hierarchy. It’s about how you make a decision across the product organization to support various needs and lenses of the business.
Product operations ensures that people work at a consistent output - this consistency needs to be to an extent where effective decision making can happen.
Melissa asks Becky about some mistakes people make with portfolio management. “When people think about portfolio management, they usually think about hierarchy,” Becky shares. “The challenge with hierarchy is that it’s static - once your business changes, you’re stuck. People forget the problem they’re trying to solve with the business when they spend so much time trying to figure out a hierarchy.”
When companies started out trying to do agile and Scrum purely by the book, they encountered many difficulties because there was so much learning, evolving and adapting involved in those processes.
You don’t need to roll out portfolios in every facet of your company - that would be way too time-consuming and tedious if you have multiple products. Rather, you can start in a few product areas. “Take one or two teams who are ready for change and start to apply portfolio management to areas that are somewhat independent,” Becky advises.
No one can build a product alone, and no one can take it to market alone.
Becky and Melissa discuss why the role of Chief Product Officer is necessary. Becky says, “Having a leader driving the vision and strategy and enabling the team actually innovates and creates ideas, and makes them able to deliver.”
Resources
Becky Flint on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter
Transcript:
Melissa:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the product thinking podcast. Today, we're talking all about product operations with Becky Flint and she is the CEO and founder of a company called dragonboat. And dragonboat is a portfolio management tool that is really helping companies understand more about their products and how they're investing in those and how they're reaching their goals. So welcome, Becky.
Becky:
Thank you for having me.
Melissa:
How did you get into this whole thing with portfolio management and decide to start dragonboat?
Becky:
Yeah, it's an interesting story. I never really planned to start a company. I was literally pushed into it. So maybe just get started a little bit early on, uh, my journey in products. Um, a lot of people think about product ops was relatively new and I'm really glad to hear there more talks and, and awareness of that, but it was really started, um, very, very early on, you know, one of us to think about when you have product, you have product ops. And my journey was that PayPal, when in early 2000, it was probably one of the first product ops person at, at PayPal. And it was brought in to help PayPal, to launch in countries outside the us. So PayPal was only in a couple of countries and we were trying to launch into additional countries, as you can imagine, launching a product in countries, uh, for payment products, not a small thing.
There's a product, multiple product teams, there's business, there's country, and all sorts of things needs to happen. So that's really, uh, started a as an international expansion. And now look back to, to, you know, look at a lot of companies later on probably decades later in the valley, you see Uber started the product ops was because they were launching new countries and Airbnbs, and many of them as really the, some of the ideas of how this role is, uh, very diverse and evolving over time now. Um, so we were launching PayPal from a couple countries to, you know, dozens, to over a hundred, basically to everywhere the company was also scaling from, uh, the time where product managers are selling to one conference room to, uh, you know, dozens and, and the hundreds through that, that journey we realized, Hey, the way we run product won't work anymore.
And we have to figure out how to lead product teams across bigger organizations. We can still do customer driven, but how do we manage different types of customers that, you know, domestic international consumer merchant and all the, the changes that we need to adapt. So that really moved, uh, morphed in the role into something around product process transformation. And so we were doing product process transformation. We realized the traditional way we were taught to organize and then operate in a round product. Doesn't really work because there are so many different facets in the lens. You know, we call it dimensions that we're looking at a product regardless. It's a different market, different segments, long term, short term horizon, um, type of investment. So, uh, that's where, um, you know, based on some of the learnings and, and my finance background, I propose to take approach called a portfolio management, really look at the different ways we should think about our product, you know, you know, putting the swim lanes together and how do we allocate different places in addition to just the prioritization.
And that's really the start of the portfolio management at PayPal, we did a couple iterations and obviously there was no tool. And the thoughts was just in place. As, as, as I was, um, helping PayPal build portfolio management, we had to build internal tools to support us a couple times now, fast forward a few years later, um, I went to a few more companies realized, wow, every company faced the same problem. And then we need to have a way to manage a product and a portfolio across teams. And there was no tools. So ultimately it became my fancy spreadsheets and, and souped up where people started, came to me to ask for tools and, and, and, you know, once that happened and multiple times ultimately led to say, you know what? I think there's really a need of companies, all sizes, both in understanding how to do <inaudible> and having a tool to enable that that's really the start of dragonboat.
Melissa:
So when you were at PayPal rolling this out to, um, what did portfolio management end up looking like? What do you think are the key pieces that, um, every organization even needs to be able to do this effectively?
Becky:
Right. So when we started at PayPal to do portfolio management, initially, it was just thinking about how do we divide work across different quote unquote business units. So we had, you know, um, us, um, so we cut a us and then we have Europe and we have, you know, um, Latin and Australia, Asia, et cetera. So all these different business areas, they are markets that would need a product and need to prioritize different features because they're at a different stages of market adoption. And, and that's, that was the first attempt to do is to, to break out our product entire product, you know, back local roadmap into how much it would support different regions, our market. And so we will start working on that and we realize that's not enough because there are a lot of overlap. And then even in different market, we have consumer for example, and then we have merchant, we have a fraud.
How do we manage that? That really evolved into something, become a, um, sort of, um, a different way, lens , to look at it. Then we can look at it, how much we invest for today for our core product, how much we invest for innovation and so on. So the, um, the learning was portfolio management today, we do because our product is multifaceted support, different needs, having different characteristics. We have to have a way to support them in different way. And that's really what, um, led to the understanding of portfolio management is not just for large companies. Portfolio management is not just about how you create a hierarchy and a reporting app. It's really about how you make a decision across the product organization to support various needs and various lenses of the business. And so that when you are even your smaller team, you know, five team or 10 team, you still have to even your single product manager, you have to think about your product roadmap in different lenses. And that is really how portfolio management should be adopt for the product teams of all sizes to be effective in driving the outcomes and need for various stakeholders, various businesses, the various, uh, customer and the markets.
Melissa:
So the one thing that I've seen, um, about portfolio management, I think in a lot of these organizations is one people aren't doing it. Um, right. I think because it's so hard to get the information that you're talking about, and it sounds like a lot of work used to go into pulling all this information together, being able to see your investments, your spends your like different ways of slicing and dicing the data. What did things look like? Um, you know, before you started dragon boat, and I'm so curious, like who, who was the person who forced you into this? Like what, what was the problem that they made you go out there and solve with it?
Becky:
Right. The interesting thing is for, you know, I was gonna go back a little bit about product ops, how product ops and then product leaders work together in, in, you know, in partnership, really essential as product teams, team start to grow bigger. The roles are, you know, you, people used to wear multiple hats as a product leader. You used to just wear as a product leader. And then you run the organization, you run a team and you run a product process and product operations. When the product team start to get bigger, um, that role is too big to carry so many hats on. So that's where you have product operations. Why you need your product operations, because you need a way to have people work in the somewhat consistent, not a hundred percent the same, right? You need the consistency to the extent where effective decision making can happen.
When why do we need effective decision making? Because no product can be built by one team, almost all product. Look at it. There are many, many teams involved. So having product operations, a partner with the product leaders, which is that you have a vision strategy team, process, and data, then you can actually make effective decisions at all levels, from strategy to team structure, to roadmap. And when you have that, that has to, based on a lot of data, what does the customer want? What are the features driving, um, our outcome, how different the market evolve? How does this features relate to each other? So we have spreadsheets upon spreadsheets, upon spreadsheets with a tab, you know, you have different categories. So first you have this spreadsheet of each team. So each tab will have a represented team.
And you have these columns that represent the things that matter to you regardless, it's a market or it's, it's, it's a, it's a horizon and why not. And then, then you have to find a way consult and you can pivot table a hundred times to look at things differently. That obviously become a very challenging. Now that also require people actually even know how to build this. If you don't know how to build this, and then you face the challenge of what should we prioritize, how do I juggle between things in US? And let's say at EU, and there are different market at different places and different prioritization. I cannot, you know, if I make a decision purely on ROI, there's nothing gonna be built for things outside of the core business. So the needs are really coming to say, how can a product organization scale and build upon what they're doing really well, like core product, and then have new areas to growth regardless. It's a different market or is in brand new product.
And all these decisions are essential for a company to grow, to run today and grow into tomorrow. And that's the really the pain point is that how do I get all the information into place so that various folks can take a look from individual PM to, you know, product executives, the CPOs, and, and the stakeholders to understand what we want to do, why where's everything, and can we afford to do it? Do we have dependencies? So yeah, the really is driven by the data needed for making decisions across all levels of organization and product organization. For sure.
Melissa:
Yeah. That's why I got really excited. Um, when I met you and saw dragonboat because this was something that my team had done manually, uh, we tried to put together for so many companies, oh, we we'd have some analysts on our team. We would spend like upwards of, you know, 40 hours a week for eight weeks trying to get all the information outta the system slice and dice it in the right way. Do the different pivot tables, do the different lenses on it. And then, um, some of the bigger issues I saw too was how do we monitor that after, you know, after gathering that information first? So, you know, when I was at, um, uh, Athena health, we tried to create a <laugh> JIRA backlog, um, of all the OKRs and measure the progress that way. But that information wasn't really being tracked systematically in JIRA, right?
Like that's not really where that lives. So we had, so, um, we had like SLT JIRA, we called it like senior leadership team JIRA that sat over in one place. And then we kind of put our OKRs in there and then we had normal JIRA over here. Um, and it didn't work that well, we just had no idea what to use, cuz there was like no products out there that were gonna allow us to say like, Hey, here's the investment in each product that we have across the portfolio. Here's the, um, you know, here's our tracking towards these OKRs and all the strategy that we had just built and deployed. Um, and it was really a big struggle to do that. And that's what I really loved about dragonboat is that that's what you guys were pulling together. So I know you've seen that problem as well. Uh, what are you seeing companies do when it comes to like trying to pull that information up together? You know, themselves, like we, we were like hacking JIRA, what else are you seeing people do?
Becky:
Right. Oh, I have seen so many. Like if you look at the most, people's the JIRA. Uh, there are tons of plugins that by the way, uh, I like JIRA, in my career I have built JIRA, every company I go to help them fix the JIRA rewired, JIRA. I did tons of a hack as well, but ultimately I realize something that, um, you know, it's a great tool. It's a flexible, you can do a lot of things, but it's not built for product decisions, not built for portfolio decisions. So let me take a step back on why that's the case. Well, first of all, we know there's, there is, you know, I connected it two steps, but definitely two separate steps, right? There is a product it's, there is a part of the strategy alignment designing on what is a goal we should do, what kind of best we're taking as a whole fuzzy part of the product management.
And then there's a part of execution, which is we know what we're gonna do at the directional level, and now we can get it done. So when you put two of them or in one tool, you are biased to what the tool is built for. So, you know, if we, if you have a bicycle, you ride a bicycle. If you have a car, you ride a car, there are two very different things. But when you give people a tool, the way you think, the way you work a a hundred percent or 90% morphed by the, what the tool was built for. So I'm not say a JIRA group, but you know, work, um, pretty hands on JIRA work with a lot of JIRA consultants over the years spent ton of money on that. And that's what I learned is that when you start with the execution tool, you think very, very differently from when you start with a tool, that's looking at the roadmap, looking at the strategy, looking at what we could do.
And then when you decide what we could do, what problem we try to solve and how we gonna solve it, then you go to the execution tool. So to answer your question, what happens is a product organization. Well-round product organization need to be efficient, but it cannot just think about efficiency now, JIRA, and these executing tools really help you to drive efficiency, have visibility, get work, lined up and all that stuff, but it doesn't help you to be effective. Meaning you, are you solving the right problem? Are you solving the problem the right ways? Right. So, you know, <laugh>, that's also how I came to you. Uh, Melissa, that was the book about escaping the build trap. I was like, oh my gosh, this is like, this is exactly what's happening in these companies, including the ones that I worked at. It's like we trying to optimize a process then the, because the tools and process, the practic case and philosophy are so intertwined and that's, what's happening, everyone just looking at a velocity, looking at, you know, burn downs and, and that's output. That's not outcome.
Melissa:
Yeah. Where are the biggest mistakes that you've seen? Um, when people are just getting into portfolio management, just starting to look at outcomes, start deploying it, start tracking it. Um, you know, what are some of the pitfalls that you've been observing?
Becky:
So there are a couple things that, um, I, I noticed. So, um, I actually have, um, or share with the show notes afterwards, there's something we called the, uh, the maturity model of the product portfolio management. Outcome focus, the product management, which rely on product portfolio management skill, uh, is that a lot of times that people think about portfolio management, they think about hierarchy. I also, you know, I have a hierarchy of, um, something and, and that's how I define my portfolio. The challenge is that hierarchy is EC static. As soon as you design a hierarchy, once your business change, you're stuck. And that's, that's one of the, the challenge that people spend a lot of time to figure out a hierarchy and they really forget what was the problem you try to solve. In reality, a portfolio has many lenses, different, uh, perspectives.
So you have to think about building that in a more dynamic way, rather than aesthetic. I have this hierarchy from, you know, you know, goals and initiatives, and there's only one of them. What about you think about your, um, you know, horizon? What are you think about your categories of investment? So that's, that's the first part, the second part, think about portfolio management. That's like really big part. A lot of times people say, oh, I have, you know, I have a JIRA premium, I have a JIRA portfolio and I have a portfolio management cuz I can roll up everything, but that's just re right again, it's sort of the, from the end of the line, versus from the beginning of the line to think about what we could do, what are the problems that are really important for us and urgent there's important and urgent that's really define what problem.
So thinking about portfolio management, a very narrow way and trying to just do rollout reporting and thinking that was portfolio management, as, you know, maybe 20, 30% of it, but you really get benefit. The main purpose of portfolio management is to define what problem you wanna solve and, and how, what is your strategy and how do you allocate your investment? People don't think about resources. People don't think about investment, but a great idea. A good bet would be good bet when you put a million in, but if it takes two, three, 4,000,000, and 3 years, that's not the bad you wanna do. So you have to think about both the, the problem and the, the sequence of that and how much you're willing to put it into it. Right? So that's real portfolio management. That's the second part. So fully think about the roll up and not thinking about how, uh, how things can, uh, needs to really start from the beginning to, in terms of deciding on something before doing something.
The third part of the portfolio management is, uh, too, too rigid. Um, and that's sometimes a lot of times people, companies fail to implement something like portfolio management to say, I need to define the whole process for entire company. There's a book you can follow. Exactly. I'm not saying you don't need that. You don't need to define all of them all at once and to, uh, to the letter or exactly how you do it. Think about the portfolio as, as a cadence, a rhythm, right? And, and I think that's something you can kind of look back when companies start to do agile and scrum, when you do pure by the book, once it was always very difficult to roll out because there's just so much learning and so much, um, you know, evolving and, and adapting and adjusting to the company. So these days there's, you know, gotten variety of, of scrum from a, you know, weekly to two week, sometimes companies have three or four weeks and they do dual track.
There are multiple variety of that. That's, you know, cuz after 15 years finally people realize there's a principle and then there's execution follow the principle, but not exactly the same, same thing for portfolio management. When you're trying to roll out portfolio management, it's an even bigger impact, touch a lot, um, more functions than just a scrum team. So the best way to do instead do a cloud change, everything really start with a couple teams. Are you, so you will say, oh, if I have a three, four teams not a portfolio, that's not really exactly true because a portfolio mindset really takes into consideration say, what are the, a number, a bunch of categories of business problems or, or product areas or opportunities. One, we want to explore how we evaluate them. How do we understand dependencies and also allocation? So these are portfolio practice and thinking, and at which point we push to execution like it's your Azure DevOps.
So that, um, portfolio management, we call the agile rollout. You can call incremental rollout, minimum viable process rollout. If you do that, it will be much better. Cuz then you real, you can understand where is, is the organization ready? Which teams are ready as they are rolling out, what do they learn? What they didn't learn? Uh, so that's, you know, gradual roll out to smaller teams, but go through the whole process. So then you know how portfolio management could be done in the company for one area. So then it can expand to broader area and I'm not taking a big fan. So these are some of the, the, the problem, not obviously the LA one, you know, last but not least is to not having the people. It's not a small thing. It required, you know, thought process change. So, you know, have of the product and you know, ideally with the product ops person or someone play their head, it's essential when you, when you just have an idea, not having the people actually make the change, then it's not going to happen.
Just again, going back to the agile, I think about it. You know, portfolio management is just the next evolution of, of agile, really having much bigger and broader, um, sort of the influence on how the organization can iteratively improve and get better. So when companies were rolling out agile in the early days, they had to have a champions, they have have a scrum masters. So then you can actually get the team to practice this same thing. If you want to, um, get outcome focused and practice portfolio management, you need someone like a product ops to get the team, a bunch of a few product teams at least to start a process and then from there to learn and grow.
Melissa:
So if you are in, um, I'm thinking of like maybe if you're a leader in a bank, right. Uh, you oversee one of the business lines. You wanna roll this out, um, across, you know, some of your areas where I feel like some people, the reason I'm getting into this, I feel like some people don't quite understand the concept of portfolio management and you just described it really nicely. Like it doesn't have to be super concrete. Like it could be around different product areas. How do you suggest they look at defining their portfolio, right? Like what's the, what's the tip or trick for looking at? Like sometimes they have up to 800 products, which are way too many, you know, in some of these larger companies, but we've got like 800 products. We've got all these things over here. Like where do you draw boundaries? Um, around things to be like, Hey, these are my portfolios. Or I can slice and dice this in a way where it's not like I'm measuring investment across 800 things. I'm measuring it more in, in stuff that's a little bit more meaningful.
Becky:
Right? Uh it's um, it, I'm glad you asked that question. It's interesting that we actually just rolling out, uh, dragonboat to a, a very large, you know, top five bank in the us. And uh, um, and, and that we're not rolling out to the whole company. Um, we know we have a roadmap to roll out to the whole company with dozens of a portfolios, but we roll out to just a couple product areas like a pro um, you know, sort of the portfolio, right? If you think about a company as a bank, they have, we work called a portfolio of portfolios underneath that you have individual portfolios that's using, if in the bank, let's say most bank have things like consumers and, and the business and consumer banking business, the banking and, and loans, the mortgages and otherwise. So I think that, um, rolling out, uh, you know, let's just take consumer, for example, if I pick, you know, one or two of their internal portfolio and then look at them to say, okay, how can we think about our portfolio management differently in terms of across our individual sub teams and sub product and product groups, how we are going to work together, drive the, the outcome that it's that's, um, our portfolio outcome portfolio goals in the grant, um, sort of, um, backdrop of the overall bank goals.
So first of all, finding, uh, how we play and then think about us, uh, you know, this sub portfolio portfolio, it's a little entity operating, a bigger word. So if you think about that as, so sort of the CEO of your own area, and you will think about what are the sets of goals that are, that we need to accomplish is an investment option, right? So that's your portfolio and you have a portfolio of goals to support how, how does my initiative and the best associate to that I drive those outcome. And then I have to think about even for my sub product areas, how do I decide across them? And then I have to think about it. You know, obviously even for my customer, I have a new customer, existing customer, high net worth and, and, and, and not high net worth.
So you also look at that as well. So basically taking one or two areas that are either, uh, sort of, um, on the forefront of, you know, wanna change things to why we wanna change things, cuz we, we wanna be ahead of the competition in general, right? It's just, if, if we, we do great, we don't need to change, but if we wanna get faster, get better, drive more outcome and be more competitive. We wanna make change when the team's ready to make change, take that team and, and, and, and to put them into this framework and to work with them in terms of understand the different lenses, we look at a portfolio how a portfolio workflow, um, can go through in terms of your annual, um, vision and alignment and quarterly sort of the milestone and evaluation and planning and so on. So taking one or two teams who are ready, uh, for change and, uh, started to apply, uh, portfolio management to that area that are relatively, um, not insulated, but somewhat independent so that it's not gonna disrupt the rest of the organization because ultimately everything output to execution execution can start with execution is the product and the portfolio and the decision and prioritization part that's primarily limited by the area.
Melissa:
So when you're looking for those teams too, what's gonna signal to you that they're ready for change, that they're ready to start with this approach.
Becky:
Um, so it, so I would use, uh, two scenarios, um, for real, even in my previous experience directly working with the teams, one is they are going through some structural change already. They have a new leader and they have a new product line being brought into, or there are some, either competitive or whatever turnaround there's, there's a catalyst to change and people are environment. So the catalyst for change is definitely one of them. Then two is that, um, that team is also, um, more focused on how they can. Okay, so maybe taking one step back, let me think about this. Um, how do we identify the team ready for change? I think it most likely is because either we have new leaders in an area, then leader want to bring things to change and guess what, if you are a product leader and then you go to the organization, one of the fastest way, one of the fastest way for a new product leader to, um, to, um, to really make impact is to, um, is to evaluate whether this organization is ready and the chances that they almost always are to take a more holistic view, uh, and then just take the outcome focused and product portfolio management process.
So, um, newly quite often are the main thing. And the other one is emerging of different group or spread up the group again, some major changes would cause would it be the, a real indicator of readiness for change? Now you would say, wow, if you are a new leader, you come in, try to implement portfolio management. Isn't it too risky. Is it too much change? Um, do I really wanna take on that? So that's what I thought before, but we, uh, through working with the, you know, thousands team and through also working personally from company to company to bring portfolio management into the fold was actually, this is something, this is, is a cure or a solution to a lot of problems the team are facing. They just didn't know this is a curable problem. So example was as a new leader, you come into organization, you were, you would do a listening tour, right.
To find out, okay, what is the sales say about us? What, what is this, you know, think about the product manage product team and what is the customer success? How about the engineering team? How about ops team as you started to do a listening tour, you almost always hear about, I don't know how designs are made. I don't know where everything is. Uh, what's the status of this, this, this initiative, our customer want this, we promise this one and the product launch to Mar like you hear almost always a very, very consistent challenges. And these challenges can be solved by having a framework of portfolio management in that you engage stakeholders while understanding stakeholders, which is not really, you know, the idea is like sales really is, is sort of like the proxy for newer potential customers and customer success is a proxy for existing customers.
And, and so on. So as you start to have more insight and input into your portfolio decision and engage them either directly with them and or through external, uh, through customers, um, you would get their input and then it will address a lot of, sort of the, the visibility, the trust, the transparency and, and how decisions made the problem. Right? And then as you have a framework, you would be able to using data to quantify why we invest in these areas, why we prioritize these initiative and the roadmap items. So, so that everyone, again, bring along everyone to understand, well, no one can get everything they want, but at least that they can be onboarded, understand why we make decision. They have a, an input to that as well. And so that they can help the product team better in terms of selling to customers and serving the customers, make them more successful. The operations can support it. So in the end product team works with all functions. No one can build a product along this internally, right across product teams. And no one can take the product to the market alone within one single product team. That's why I have a portfolio management approach is to connect different, um, functions and pieces at the right time. So you drive alignment, you have a database decision. So you provide a visibility without, you know, tons of spread, tons of PowerPoints and, and just discipl, uh, information, make everyone feel confused and lost.
Melissa:
Yeah. The one thing I've seen that is a huge problem. Usually more for companies that don't have strong product leadership, but, um, you know, it could be in other ones that do, they aren't really taking a portfolio vision of all the products that they have, right? Like there's no strategy or wrapper around, like, how are all these things gonna come together and like move our company forward. Um, and usually that's a good signal to me when I'm out there, like looking at companies that they need a chief product officer to, you know, really build that portfolio vision, put it out there, talk about how all of these things align. I imagine there's, you know, some work that these companies have to do before they can, you know, use dragonboat, start with the portfolio management, um, probably around like setting up their strategies. What are you, what are you seeing when like things go wrong when that's not happening? Um, what types of, you know, information are they getting through the portfolio management? And what do you recommend people do to like sit down and prepare to get into the portfolio management, um, process? What do they need to do? Like what's the groundwork they have to lay,
Becky:
Right? The groundwork in. So we think about things mostly around the people, the, the process and, and the platform slash tool. So if we just have the tool, we don't have the process framework, we don't have the people, um, it's not going to be successful. That's, um, definitely where even for us at dragon boat, we don't just give you software, right. We actually provide training, coaching webinars and, and, and partner with, uh, with you and, and other, um, you know, experts in the space to enable the other key elements, which is the people and the process. So let's talk about people. Um, you kind of mentioned earlier a little bit of chief product officers, why that role is needed. And I wanna double click on that, right? So if no, one's looking at it overall and everyone looking at their own area and they're reporting to, uh, a role that's not product.
And, and that's obviously that the product will be not looking at overall tu companies where you really see, you know, silo teams and well, they call their, you know, sort of durable team, but really they're just a silo team because they don't work with each other. They don't really know what's going on and they have their own roadmaps. And you see the, the orchard all over on the product because they didn't work together. And the prioritization, it was just each team prioritize their own backlog or someone say, Hey, I'm gonna start from JIRA, pull my backlog. That's my product management planning. Um, so having a holistic view of product team as a whole and looking at where we need to work, uh, together and, and focus on different different time of horizon, different category, different market, and collaborate in terms of product and experience and technology platform is critically important.
Having a leader to drive the vision, drive the strategy and enable the team actually can, you know, innovate and create ideas and then be able to deliver now not having someone as a product operations is also difficult because that leader will have to take on the role of both setting up the vision strategy and getting the team and help them to keep running it on an ongoing basis. So product ops is a critical role as well for a more structured change. So that's the people side of the things now with the right people, we can think about the right process, which is not terribly difficult, right? As we have the right people who will be supporting the right process, which really is to say, understanding our goals, define what problem we try to solve and figure out the strategy. We try to accomplish them and use that to drive across team level of decision.
Now, I know I said this, a lot of the sort of understanding goals and strategy and so on. It is just decision making process doesn't mean that, you know, there's no nuance of how to do that. That's where people, the right people plus the right decision making process. And then you add a tool on top of it so that it will enable you, um, the, you know, the framework, the data, the visibility on, are we making the right? What are the, what are the, the data and elements we need to make decision? And what is our current decision and where we are in terms of progress, regardless, the roadmap progress, or is, is it your strategy and outcome progress? So that really enable the three things, the people, the process, and then tooling and, and, and platform will support the effective change.
Melissa:
So with that too, um, we need some kind of strategy to, to deploy, right? Like some right concrete goals to measure and make sure that we can roll those up and look at it. Uh, what are you seeing with companies like building out their OKRs, putting it into these frameworks, trying to get there? Uh, I've seen, like it's such a mixed bag of whether people are doing it or not like one of, one of the issues. I think when, uh, everybody tries to start like at a portfolio managed approach or try to measure this is they're like, Hey, what are the outcomes that we want? And they just spit out a bunch of them, but they didn't actually do the work to figure out how do things ladder up to those outcomes? How do we actually calculate, what's a good goal going into it? Uh, what are those types of things that you see at the roll up level there?
Becky:
Right. So, um, one of the biggest challenge is to say, how do we turn a business, sort of the, you know, very lagging, okay, right. The revenues or retentions, and how do we move that over to, into a, a leading indicator? How do we, um, so first of all, we will align on what are the goals we try to achieve, but there are so many ways to achieve their goals, right? So the part is important to say, how do we going to achieve these goals? And these are like, that's, that's called products. Cause sometimes strategy seems very abstract. Well, really that is to say, for us to grow revenue, what should we do? What's our strategy? Are we gonna go to a new market? Are we gonna deepen our existing product? Are we gonna build a new product? So that is the product strategy leading to the, if you align that first, then you will say, if our goal is to grow revenue three times or two times revenue, and in order for that to do revenue, instead of doing partnership, instead of doing acquisition, doing X, Y, Z, we're gonna go focus on three strategy.
We're gonna deepen our product. We're gonna go to new market and we're gonna, uh, invest in, you know, uh, um, you know, upsell. So these are the strategies being used for your team to say, okay, what kind of features initiative to, uh, drive and deepen the product adoption and all go to the new market. So as you define a strategy, this success and outcome can be measured and that will become the measure you use for future, um, um, for the, for the sort of the downstream team to, to, to prioritize.
Melissa:
So when you're thinking about product ops, um, how are those people to helping the leaders like we, we just talked about, we don't want the leaders doing it all themselves. Uh, if you are the leader of a company, you wanna start product operations, you wanna get into this, you wanna set good strategy, start portfolio management, who should they be looking for to help them start this product ops team and how do they leverage them to get started?
Becky:
So a typical product ops persona, uh, or experience the product ops have to be able to work with the product leaders, right, would have a lens of the strategy, understand the business, understand the strategy. They also have to have a lens to understand how operationalize it. So building framework, having cadences and having dashboards platforms and how to work, uh, cross-functionally so across different teams, across different areas because the product ops have to drive something called the top down alignment, right? Understand our goals and strategy that alignment from a, from an executive team to the product team, drive the top down alignment. And then you also have to empower your team to have bottom side innovation. The team cannot be empowered if they don't know where they're going, they don't know their strategies, the chaos, right? So not manage the chaos. You, you want some chaos, but you don't want to UN control the maintenance chaos.
So it's a disruptive. So you want the product ops would have to be able to work with the, um, with the product executive. So drive alignment and, you know, drive allocation, being able to work on a strategic part of things also have to be able to work on the, uh, with the team to understand bottom step innovation, empowerment, and cross functionally. And they also have to have a delivery mindset. Are we delivering, are we driving, um, driving now common delivering our, our roadmap that needed to drive the outcome. So they have to take the skills that needed really is the strategic side, as well as the team working and ability to, you know, think about the, the delivery. So some of the program, product management skill, some of, sort of the, the strategy and the business, the finance skill. And, uh, and then they also have to continuously improve product ops are product managers, they're product manager of process.
And the process is the rhyme and, and, and the process you, you build to run an entire product organization. So, um, so these are sort of the, the people skill. You look for someone who had someone wouldn't with, uh, a multiple skill set, not just product management, you need to need two or three different skill sets in terms of product and strategy, or some of the business management, maybe program management, um, you know, maybe agile, scrum, like you have to have a two or three different skills to be able to put those teams together and, and then build the rhyme and a process, which is the product for the product organization. Resources are, you know, not, not a, not a ton, right? So, and I, I know Melissa, you're working on, you know, um, you're working on a book and we're building a community on product operations.
And then we have, um, very passionate members who get into the product operations role recently of being intro for a year or two. There's a lot to talk about. And I'm very excited to have this conversation with you, Melissa, and, um, you know, continue to build the resources and tooling for the product operations community, because they're so essential to the success of the product team. And, you know, if you wanna be outcome focused and you need the framework, people as product ops and, you know, product leaders, you need a framework which is, um, product portfolio management, and you need a tooling that connect that together. And I would suggest using dragonboat as a tooling,
Melissa:
I would suggest using dragonboat too. <laugh> thank you. But I do agree it is, um, I will say it too. Like I, I do see tools every single day and dragonboat has been the best that I have ever observed to be able to roll up these things and give the insights into the leaders. And I don't say that lightly. Um, so thank you so much for putting all of your, you know, blood, sweat, and tears into making this for us, because I do think it's going to help us run better product organizations. Um, so thank you so much for being with us. Becky, if you guys wanna learn more about, um, dragon boat and also more about the product ops and how to get it started, you can go to dragon boat.io. Um, you can reach out to Becky and learn more about that company there. So thank you so much for listening to the product thinking podcast. If you like this podcast, please go and subscribe. Uh, we have a new episode out every Wednesday and next week we'll be back with another dear Melissa.
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