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 themWe'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 operationsYou 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 managementGoing 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 portfolioSometimes, 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 BeckyYou can connect with Becky on LinkedIn. You can also check out Dragonboat. Alongside their SaaS software, they also have a bunch of available resources.
Using Solution Tests to Make Sure You’re Building Products Users Want (with Jim Morris, Founder @ Product Discovery Group)
Building Life-Centred Products with Collaborative Product Discovery (with Sophia Höfling, Co-founder & Head of Product @ Saiga)
Using the Power of Community to Grow Your Startup (with Anna Maste, Founder @ Boondockers Welcome & Subscribe Sense)
Pragmatic Digital Transformation in Traditional Industries (with Dan Chapman, Director, Product Line Leader @ Merck)
Understanding & Interrupting Cognitive Biases in Product Design (with David Dylan Thomas, Author ”Design for Cognitive Bias”)
Building Disruptive Products by Harnessing Power Users (with Moustapha Seck, Founder @ Fluid)
We’re All Responsible For Accessible Product Design (with Holly Schroeder, Senior UX Researcher & Accessibility Advocate)
Aligning Teams with Data & Finding Your Second Product/Market Fit (with Matt Arbesfeld, CEO & Co-Founder @ LogRocket)
Supporting Product Managers & Standing Up for the Value of Product Management (with Princess Akari, founder @ PeopleInProduct)
Adventures in Product Management (with Dan Olsen, author ”The Lean Product Playbook”)
Getting On Top Of Your User Stories & Requirements (with Richard Awe, founder @ Requstory)
Escaping the Build Trap with Product Operations and Strong CPOs (with Melissa Perri, author ”Escaping the Build Trap”)
Climbing the Product Management Career Ladder ... and Working Out if it’s For You (with Katerina Suchkova, Founder @ Ahead of Product)
Build High Growth Products by Following the Product Science Success Path (with Holly Hester-Reilly, founder @ H2R Product Science)
The Importance of Getting Your Product Launches Right (with Derek Osgood, Founder & CEO @ Ignition)
Standing Up for Diversity & Inclusion When No One Looks Like You (with Merina Khanom, Product Manager @ BBC iPlayer)
Getting Strategic to Land Your First Product Management Job (with Crystal Parker, Product Manager & Entry Level Career Coach)
Test Business Ideas Ethically by Experimenting With, Not On, Customers (with David Bland, Co-author ”Testing Business Ideas”)
Getting Your SaaS Pricing & Packaging Right (with Dan Balcauski, Founder & Chief Pricing Officer @ Product Tranquility)
Pioneers, Settlers & Town Planners in Performance Design (with Richie Lokay, VP of Product Design and Services @ Wunderkind)
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