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Product Agility
The world of Product Discovery and Creation is becoming increasingly challenging due to mistakes and missed opportunities that are prevalent in agile teams, large-scale Scrum and all other agile frameworks. History has shown that when organisations try and scale their product development to more than one cross-functional team, mistakes are made that cut short many chances of getting all possible benefits.
The route of this for many is the need for more attention paid to the incredible advancements in Product Management driven by hordes of professional Product People who prove that making their customers happier is not a pipe dream but a hard and fast reality.
This podcast exists to explore all topics related to Product and Agility and Coaching.
How do you marry the agile principles with Product discovery?
Is it really possible to have hundreds of cross-functional teams (or Product Teams) all working from an effectively prioritised single Product Backlog and a dedicated Product Owner?
How can you embrace continuous improvement and empirical process control for your product, people and processes?
Ever wondered how to overcome the problems people face when trying to scale the Product Owner role and how it relates to Product Management and Product Teams?
Baffled by how to define a product in such a way that enables Feature Teams (aka Product Teams) and why doing wrong means you will only ever be stuck with technical teams?
Scrum Teams are not compatible with modern product management techniques.
Want to know what Product Focus means and how the right focus makes creating a shippable product less painful?
Need to get your head around how to blend modern product management techniques with Sprint Planning and Sprint Reviews to achieve Product Increments that cover the entire product?
This podcast's original focus was on Scaling Scrum vs Single-Team Scrum and how organisations can reap the benefits of Scrum when working on a larger product but still keeping a single product backlog. We found many Product People liked what we said, and then the penny dropped. This isn't a podcast about scaling Scrum or the limitations of single-team Scrum.
This podcast is for Product People & agile advocates who coach or get their hands dirty with Product creation.
We promise there is no Taboo topic that we will not explore on your behalf.
We aim to transcend the conversations about a single team, Daily Scrums, Scrum Masters and the double-diamond and bring everyone together into responsible teams dedicated to working on the entire product to make their customers happier and their lives more fulfilling.
Come and join us on our improvement towards perfection, and give us your feedback (we have a strong customer focus, too), and who knows, perhaps we will discover the magic wand that we can wave over all the broken agile and sudo-products to create a more resilient and adaptable future by bringing the worlds of Product, Agility and coaching together.
This podcast has the conversations and insights you need.
Product Agility
From Product Management to Strategic Leadership with Becky Flint - Productized 24 TalkInTen
Productized 2024 is our third conference of the year, and we’re thrilled to bring you exclusive insights from this world-class event!
In this special TalkInTen series, we sit down with industry leaders at the forefront of product and business agility, sharing actionable wisdom in short, sharp episodes. This year’s conference is brimming with innovative frameworks, cutting-edge ideas, and real-world stories designed to help you and your teams adapt, evolve, and excel.
Our first guest is Becky Flint, Founder and CEO of Dragonboat.io, who shares her journey from hands-on product manager to strategic product leader. Becky discusses the crucial shift from tactical execution to strategic thinking that can help product professionals at every level, from new managers to CEOs, drive greater business impact and career growth.
Episode Highlights:
- Strategic Product Leadership: What it means and why it’s essential at every stage of your career.
- Driving Product ROI: Practical tips to align strategic leadership with business outcomes.
- Scaling for Impact: How to build product teams that scale with agility and achieve results faster.
If you're looking to elevate your approach to product management and leadership, this episode is packed with practical insights and strategies to help you thrive in a dynamic and complex product landscape.
Connect with Becky Flint on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/beckyflint/
Enjoyed the episode? Please leave a review and stay tuned for more TalkInTen episodes from the Product Agility Podcast!
Use code PROD24 for 15% off Sheev’s training courses, designed to help product teams connect purpose with action.
Sheev - https://www.sheev.co.uk
Host Bio
Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.
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Ben Maynard
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Product Agility Podcast
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Welcome to a very special series of episodes of the Product Agility Podcast, broadcasting for two days, direct from Lisbon Portugal and product ties 2024. This year, we're bringing you more exclusive bite-sized wisdom with our Talks in 10 format, where we're going to be diving into actionable insights from some of the best and brightest minds in product leadership. And attendees this year are being spoiled with talks and workshops from the likes of Radakadot, creator of radical product thinking and Rich Morinov, author of the art of product management, helping us all find some joy in what we do. But it would be a pretty shitty conference if it was just two people. There are so many more people here and we're going to be getting as many of them as possible on here to share their talks in 10. Now before we begin, a huge thank you to our sponsor, Sheev Limited. Sheev is a company which has bankrupted this podcast pretty much since day one. I want to take an opportunity just to share with you and make you aware we do some awesome stuff. Whether it's training your product teams or coaching your product teams with clarity and alignment or you know just a simple thing I've actually making OKRs work in organisations. These are all things that we are very good at. So do head over to www.sheev.co.uk, see what we do and get in contact with us. Also check out the show notes for a tasty little discount code over any of our courses. Grab a notebook because the next 10 minutes are going to be packed with actual tips from the best in the business. And here begins a talking 10. So this is the first episode that I'm recording at productise 2024. For some reason I've had a bit of a mental blank. I keep thinking it's 2025 but it's 2024 and I'm joined by Becky Flint. It's really awesome to have you as the first person on the podcast. Welcome. Thanks Ben. You're here this day as a attendee. You've got nothing on today have you? Today I am a attendee. I was a speaker yesterday and it will be tomorrow. So yesterday was a workshop. It was kind of the leadership retreat kind of integration because last year of a leadership retreat was at the end of the conference this year it's integrated into the conference. Right the leadership talk in the beginning the first session. What was that talk on? Oh my. There are quite a few things that we talk about. I think it really is thinking about the future of product. What is the product and then where are we today and some of the challenges and then you know closing on a positive note what the future would be. Always nice to close into a positive rather than like apocalypse. No, no one wants to talk about the apocalypse. No. We're here. We won't make it happen. We'll prevent it. That's what we do right? Product people. We're fixing. For the listeners that haven't heard of you before. Could you share with them what is it that has kind of put you in such an awesome position to be sharing such knowledge? Yeah. Thank you. So it's obviously a long story. My name is Becky Flint. Today I'm the founder and CEO of Dragonbow.io. You can check it out. Dragonbow is an AI powered product operations platform. And our goal is to help product teams to make better and faster impact with less work of course. And the prior to Star Dragonbow my journey actually went through various forms of product management from student entrepreneur to working at very big companies. Then to work at this tiny startup back in the days called PayPal and the health of PayPal. Right. And really at the right time so to speak when the PayPal was growing very rapidly I was leading global expansion product operations actually launched PayPal Portugal 16 years ago. So yeah connected to this country. And then later on fast forward a few other companies and it really helped to grow and build and scale and transform product operations, product operating model, portfolio management actually the other one most recent one was at the company called Fizzi. I'm not sure you heard of. Very close to here. It was also a startup help build the first product organization. And today is a unicorn. It's one of the very well known tech companies in Portugal and fighting financial crime with the AI. So throughout the journey working with the companies of all sizes and as a product person, portfolio product executives and then realize the challenge in the product space that not only you need product skills or you call it a product excellence, you need another ingredient the right hand on the hand the other ingredient we called operating excellence the operating skills of product at all levels. How do you bring product? Not a concept not just build with engineers actually to market to deliver impact and then working through all the things involved. So my talk tomorrow is about from product management strategic leaders and that journey and really covers the things I learned throughout. It sounds like you're in an incredibly strong position to be sharing such a story. I'm not able to listen to your talk unfortunately because I'll be sat here. So I'm kind of want to get as much information as I can from you now whilst I've got you. Yeah, that's totally fine. I think a sneak preview maybe. Yeah, please. Well, let's just get a bit of a sneak preview. I'm curious because I think the word strategic and leadership are very overused and they've been very different things to very different people and our listeners are a vast, vast collection of different people. We have some people who are from the from the product world, product professionals, we've got senior leaders, CTO CEOs, heads of engineering, heads of a heads of product. We've also got lots of agile people, agile coaches and screen masters. So we've got a huge range of people and I'm can pretty, pretty certain that each of those types of people has a different idea about what strategic leadership really means. How would you define it in your context? It's a very good question. It's a very similar to agile. It's a very misunderstood as well that people, some people who think about that as you know, scrum, right, the very basic form or if you think broader and that strategic thoughts and practice is nothing short of agile, right? In the end, if you think about it, you know, product management, agile and strategy plays a place a role in how we as a human and as organization interact with the environment we're in, right? So if we have to work in a fast changing turbulent environment and we have to be able to both predict and respond, predict, add, respond and adjust quickly. So the word strategic that it's not like long-term thinking, people say strategic is long-term thinking that's not correct. Strategic can be applied throughout different phases of organization. If you're executive, you cannot be strategic for two minutes because the organization relies on the output of strategic practice. Therefore, you have to have a longer term horizon where if you're individual person, I say I'm an engineer, let's say I'm product manager, which would have a bigger scope, your time horizon for strategic thinking is very different. So what exactly is strategic thinking and a strategic leader? That approach different from a tactical is tactical is about doing. I'm going to doing it as fast as efficient as quickly as I can. Strategic is a problem-solving. It's to say we want to go achieve this goal. How do I achieve this goal? There are different ways to go about to achieve that goal. So understanding where you want to go and evaluate all the possibilities, this is a strategic process and strategic thinking is that. Now, when you say understand how you get there, you have to think about, okay, what not just any like they just say, sometimes people say, hey, we want to double revenue. Okay, that's a goal. How do you do that? There are infinite number of ways, like a high-more people have a new product. We can reduce some, we can, we can, you know, expand certain areas, the future capability, respricing. All these things are possibilities. So then the strategic process is to say, how do we make that decision? If one or two things we can do, that's the best for us at this moment, given the resource, given the timeline, given the market, given the capabilities of what we have. So that is strategic. Now, if you're a CEO, you have to think a much bigger goal. But if you're a product manager, you say, I need to make sure that the feature gets adopted, right? I have a feature and need to be adopted. How? The thought process is a strategic. You have to consider not only just the possibilities of what can be done, also what resources you have, what timeline you have, what alternatives people have. So that process of thinking is strategic. It's something you're really passionate about. Yes. I can see it. I can see it. You came alive more and more. I was sharing all of that. I know we haven't got a lot of time. So this may be a strange question, but it's something you're really passionate about. That's really clear. What's something that really pisses you off about this? But what you've been sharing there about product managers, but seeing your leaders and strategy, like what's the one thing that really, really kind of upsets you that you've observed or what you see happen? I think I wouldn't let's say pissed off then how sometimes I said, you know, I think we as people are smart creative people. I think when you misunderstand what the means to be strategic, you say, oh, I'm not a CEO. I'm not an executive. That's not me. I just do what I'm supposed to do. And that's kind of sad. I feel like you just give up what you could do. And, you know, we're here for a reason. And there's you don't have another chance, right? You're here once. Well, at least I think for this time, for this time, right? And therefore, you know, you can be strategic. You need to be strategic. Your product manager can say, hey, so my executive come to me to say, we need to build this feature. So I'm just building it. I'm, you know, dispowered. And as someone on the other side, as executive today, I'm the CEO of the company. And before I was in the executive position many, many times, I would say when I gave something is, it's my tactical goal, which is we need to get this done because a bigger strategic decision made with a lot of things input that we can't just get the entire company to be part of it. But once we decide we need to build this thing, there's a lot of things to be done to say how to best build this thing faster, more efficient, better than the customers or whatever impact you can make faster. That is strategic thinking. You can't just say, oh, I'm just delivered. No, there's arts in it. You can say, I don't have your hands not tied. You have entire engineering team, design team, all the others are working with you to deliver this feature. You are the leader. You are responsible to be strategic. The others then can be, right? Every step away, there's a strategic thinking and evaluation approach involved. So I really, that's the thing, pissed me off and also make me sad. It's because the misunderstanding of what that means to be strategic. You don't need to lead a company. This feature is your strategic goal. Do it really well. Kill it. Inspire your team. Kill it. Now, when you go to designer, designer says, okay, I need to design this thing. That's what, they need to be strategic. Okay, what is the limitation of my engineering capability? What the product needs to do? They have a lot of constraints. You have to react to that constraint. So, I could always know when it's been a good talking 10 episode when the time disappears. And I've got 100 more questions I'd like to ask. I'd love to get you back on one day for a longer episode. The back of your time is up, unfortunately, it's a tragedy. But hopefully, listeners, you've got a good taste of what Becky wants to talk about. And hopefully, you're kind of intrigued to see the talk. I'm guessing the talks will be videoed right now, and I'll be made available over the coming weeks or months. But Becky, people did want to find that more about you or contact you about something. What's the best way for them to do that? You can find me on LinkedIn, Becky Flint. I'm simple to find. And I'm from Dragon Ball. So, if you find other Becky Flint, you can look for Dragon Ball. That's the one. Okay. I'm on the same boat with you. Becky, thank you so much for being the first person to come on and do our talking 10 episode at Proteise24. And everyone, thank you for actually listening. We'll be back again very soon. These episodes will be coming up bit by bit over the next few weeks. So, do make sure you subscribe to the podcast to be made aware of when the new episodes come out. Becky, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
