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.
Building High Performing Cross-Functional Teams as a PM (with Hanne Ockert-Axelsson, Senior Product Manager @ accuRx)
Why We Need To Stay Aligned to Avoid Product Failure (with Jonathon Hensley, author ”Alignment”)
The Importance of Making Design a Strategic Business Partner (with Wolfgang Bremer, Head of Design @ Elli)
How to Manage Imposter Syndrome in Product Management (with Phyllis Njoroge, author ”From Fraud to Freedom”)
Product Leadership is Hard - Let‘s Get Better At It (with Ebenezer Ikonne, author ”Becoming a Leader in Product Development”)
Building Effective Technical Skills for Product Managers (with Irene Yu, founder @ Skiplevel)
Leading & Evolving Product Teams Through Hyperscale (with Brian Shen, Product Director @ ClickUp)
Breaking Down Silos in Product Development (with Sigurd Seteklev, co-founder @ Kitemaker)
Can Sales & Product Really Get Along? (with Brendan McAdams, author ”Sales Craft”)
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Selling Product Thinking by Influencing Companies at the Right Time (with Anthony Marter, product consultant & chair @ Product Aotearoa)
Maintaining a Collaborative & Inclusive Product Culture at Scale (with Anna Curzon, Chief Product Officer @ Xero)
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Navigating the World of Product Management (with George Nurijanian, Product Owner @ Xero & Founder @ prodmgmt.world)
Fighting Fires in B2B Product Management (with Rich Mironov, Product Consultant & author ”The Art of Product Management”)
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