Driving Portfolio Management with Becky Flint

Melissa Perri 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