 Hey everyone, this is Carlos and the founder and CEO at Product School and today we have Becky Flint Who's the CEO at Dragon Boat? Hey Becky. Hi Carlos Thanks for joining the show excited to chat with you about many things including the name of your company So let's start with that. Yeah. Thank you. So you know Dragon Boat is actually a race in a very long shape boat and the reason that we have a name for the company is because Alignment collaboration team energy and everyone running the same direction with a strategy and a strength is What's essence to a success in a Dragon Boat race and it's also the essence and a key to successful product positions? So I you know, we feel this is a very in tune of a starter company to empower product positions with the name for essence of You know winning team That's really cool. I love the analogy I've been looking for so many different examples to explain the role of the product manager or the product manager team And this is a this is a good one and before that I know you were a product leader at all their organizations So tell us a little more about your story how you broke into product and then eventually decided to launch your own company Yeah, thank you for that. It's interesting. We never can predict our path So I came through this country for our business school in their earlier days in the you know Web one other era, you know, I was focusing on finance and next thing, you know, it's a web one other in another. It's coming I want to have startup companies. It's so exciting. I said forget about finance I'm gonna go get into internet and I'm gonna go work in the startups I was joined a startup. I either started my startup everything goes well and boom things happened and Internet bubble bursted and then, you know, obviously my finance skill saved me I started working for you know banking companies and next you know Alinated at PayPal when it was young and small and it was only in four countries. I was lucky enough to help scale the company grow into more than 200 countries that part of process also face the challenges of building product lots of needs lots of demands of different countries of different teams lots of dependencies How do we build agile? How do we build a scale? Who's a part of the process and learn that and build internal tools and next, you know I was at a couple of other companies to also help to build a scale product organizations and The best practice was understood, but there wasn't any tool tried everything. There wasn't anything So finally when people start came to me asking for my, you know glorified the spreadsheets and the best practice is already crew me to work for that company and dragon was born. I Hear you because that's kind of the reason why is that at proud school There are a lot of people building products, but they weren't really shared They're common agreed best practices and everyone was kind of inventing the wheel and I felt that need to Learn from others instead of trying to do everything myself But I think there's also a big gap between You joining a company that you know are growing fast and you've built entire teams And then why did you decide to go back to that zero to one phase and launch your own company? Yeah, it's it's a it's definitely a big jump. You know, one of them is that You know as a product person you always solve problems And I would say process and tooling so those are also problems You start a company it just a format to solve the same problem like you said and when there's a gap There's best practice There's no tooling become a pattern and then I knew that I know from my experience and learning and working with others a Best practice around how to build a scale product So I thought hey if I constantly get recruited from company to company Can every company I can see for about a year or so to move on the next demo scale How do I scale it? So that's why I started companies so that we can actually scale what's working and codified it into a product and What is the overlap your opinion between building products for somebody Versus building your own company It's a good question. I think there are two parts one is the building product for somebody or for your customers is the driving force of it and Building the company is enabler So us as a product people, you know when you join a company as a part of the company building product You know customer You know you need to solve them better and you do sort of that the good product management stuff, right? And then next, you know for a good company, they will have to look at say what's next So the great product managers actually have to look at what's next, right? And then a third part is how do I get the resources and the teams and the people around it to achieve? What's next and the you know, so the cliche word called that the next S curve, right? So you think about it the building a company is really taking the next curve on the side as a stand-alone and entity and start to do that So building the company solving the problem same as the product management But there are a lot of things to building the infrastructure to enable us to do that it's the funding the building a team and and Lots of legal and all the other stuff comes with it. Isn't that difference it's enabler But the most exciting part. I think it's a very similar The most exciting part is helping the product helping the customer enable your team in part of team I agree and I think right now it's probably the best time in history for anyone who's considering to just create something because a lot of like you mentioned like legal ops finance and certain blocks that You need to navigate but there are companies who already figured that out and as a product manager You can just connect integrate with some of these tools and just focus on adding value and spend time on what makes you unique And obviously dragonboat is an example of that is just a product for product managers And so for people out there who are like, okay, this sounds great, but you know what I have a full-time job. I Don't know if I want to take that leap of faith and quit everything and start from scratch full-time Oh, you know What are some of the options for people to start a site hassle or just a way to test the waters before they Commit Yeah, you actually asked a very good question. I want to just take a couple of steps on that one is that You know as shared earlier me starting dragonboat is you know, 15 years in the making right? I personally face the problem how you know as the company grow and scale I would say quote-unquote. I took a side hustle at PayPal I was the running program management and then I was running, you know International expansions and then we there's a company running to a problem where we could not get things done Just getting bigger lots of dependencies and no visibility part of stations and nightmare Stayholders are all angry and they don't know who to talk. It's we cannot agile madness, right? So I proposed I figure out a solution how we work together as a team within our area multiple product areas Then I proposed it to my boss who's new and to say, hey, you know, we're not Shipping product we gonna go behind there's competition come out this innovator come up and I proposed a solution They take what we solved and and to the broader team and that I create something called the product portfolio management And that's my side hustle. It's not my job. My job is a program and a real product but I create this process and a team and also even a career, right? I created this job title called Product portfolio managers and they were working with the product working with the business and working with the planning And it's kind of like similar to products today But didn't call that back then so that my side hustle one is to create a broader impact to the company Process is a product and you create a product. I hope that is solving a problem And that ultimately not only help company to do better that skill sets and tooling I built on top of it It took me from company to company to help the other company to scale and finally the essence of it became As a company I like that because I think I mean and I've seen these are some of our students They are so obsessed with just getting a product manager job at company X You say a really cool company, right? And and that's a very valid path But I think product is more of a mindset and you can apply that to your own company You can apply it to your your current employer. You can create a side hustle It's more about like feeling empowered to create Uh, whatever that means and in that universe of Tools that allow you to create faster and not have to worry about like having a technical degree or an MBA or things like that How do you see product managers taking advantage of dragon boat just to you know build faster and better? Yeah, it's actually a very good question um So a few things one is how much you can leverage? Would you have and what this problem we try to solve? So before I go to talk about a drug and I want to talk about one example So some time ago I I mentor a lot of uh, you know younger Professionals and some of them want to be product managers Some are just relatively new to the product management career I want to say how do I take next way and when uh when this young lady She's very interested in having a side project So she keeps coming to me say what side project can I work on? So I asked her say hey What do you try to accomplish? Do you try to have a new business opportunity? Do you try to learn skills? Do you want to earn income? And then she was just saying I just want to get exposed to other areas I could find interesting because I don't actually know what I'm so excited about So I help her say hey, why don't you look at it around you? She's in a big really big organization company So I said look at things around you and then she'd start to plot a couple of challenges You see both on the product side for the areas around you and or even business process Or customer communication any of that? So she would have put them On to quote-unquote paper right on to dragon mode to say these are the different things I could be doing on different goals So I try to accomplish and then from there she said okay I can actually found a niche Thing that one is available that I can help this team to think about how their whole go-to-market process work Taking the product work cross-functionally and community to a customer And then she can add value to that team and she can build a workflow for them without engineering or any resources She can just get it internally and next you know She has side project achieved her goals and she also Get a promotion out of it and now she's a real product manager for the area because She looked at our goals and putting a couple different ideas into these goals See which one's achievable and prioritize what can be done And she did it just like a product management in your career and and dragon mode doesn't facilitate that thought process These are my goals what kind of ideas can fit into these goals And what is the requirement I need in terms of resources the timing Availability and then she picks something and take it to to fruition so Yeah, and I think the certain Creating structure and certain processes sometimes it's overlooked because you know I personally get excited about the strategy and big picture and obviously that's important too But at some point you have to execute as well and I've seen a lot of product managers saying Oh, no, that is project management stuff. I'm not going to do it Well, especially in the smallest startups I think there's a little bit of both and it's important to feel comfortable wearing multiple hats and using technology just to accelerate your impact because The days of like using a spreadsheet or just pen and paper are over Right, right, right exactly And it's the funny thing you mentioned that I was going to just share a little bit of my observation as well Is that you know, you probably heard of like a three four types of a product managers, right? Some of them are visionary Right, some of them like a project manager. Some of them like a technical guru and so on, right? I think we need a little bit of All of them, but there is a time for the right Focus, right? If you don't have vision, we're not going anywhere If you don't know how to work with a team or quote unquote project management that have understanding the dependency resources You don't get things done If if you don't understand a technical side that you cannot collaborate with your engineering team to figure out best solutions So I would say if you only one Then that's a challenge But having a tool belt of a variety of tools and skills that's important and even more important to say Knowing when to use what tool, right? So I think you know, it's it's exactly like you said I think almost always regardless of your CEO Or your individual product manager You kind of need all of these It's just the right time use the right tool. What do you think? Totally, I mean, it's an open-ended conversation, right? Like Especially like as your team grows It's just impossible to assume that the CEO has to impose the vision all the time Otherwise, why are you hiding product leaders? What a smart, you know, I want to continue I mean, I love that you are very active in the community and you give back and you participate as a speaker at Pro school many years ago and you mentor people you share that story How did you personally learn this stuff? Did you have a mentor or how were you able to Grow so fast Right. Uh, well, thank you. I think I could go faster if I if I became more aware of the looking for Mentorship, so I think that's something I want to say going back in time to see what really helped me Is to really not think about job title is a limiting factor And I think every job really is a variety of things we do So and and and you know to me was like a finding problems and try to solve these problems and create value So as I do that is You can almost think of the line of least resistance is the finding problem and solving solving problem and provide value at that time that it will really give both myself A more exposure are people that I can work with and learn from As well as create value to organization that will open stores to additional things And that's that's you know to answer your question for For younger or you know, if I would say look at my younger self. I would say Hey, I if I took more risks And more risk will force me to learn more things faster I could do probably better, but it helped just to you know Finding problems and try to solve the problem along the way to find both the book Value a book knowledge and also people I work with to learn from them for context for for guidance Yeah, and I think that this something resonates with me because as an immigrant when I moved to civic on valley for the first time I was afraid of asking questions. I still have an accent I I I didn't know if I was supposed to you know being someone And and I was very surprised when I realized that a lot of people would say yes And it was just this mental model telling me that I wasn't supposed to do something while in reality Yes, you can right and it's part of the process that a lot of people will say no But finding this type of people or opportunities and sometimes can change your life And one of the things I love about product is that yes, there are some good practices But they're all guidelines, right? There's no rules like you can build and there's nothing set in stone that is preventing you from trying an idea So in your case, I'm sure you've seen the good the the bad and the ugly What are some of the differences between good pms and excellent pms? um A very good question. I think a couple of things very jumps out is that um Sometimes it counterintuitive Like, you know, we are taught at least what I learned is that you got to talk to customers You're going to understand customer feedbacks and you know use customer feedbacks to guide your product And then we later found out that actually customer feedbacks is just to give you inspirations They don't they can't give you solutions You can't build your product based on customer feedbacks alone And therefore you have to think about what the customer problem is and really to take it to the next level uh, second part of that is to perfection right solid product good product managers are really good at data backed research and finding really like a delightful user experience And uh, you know, they don't have a high level of tolerance on You know poor ui poor ux, right? But great product managers can sometimes ignore that right? I give customers a solution better than zero And how do I take how do I balance good enough? versus They need something different and I need to give them something different even though it's not enough I think that's something very interesting to see the differences and the philosophies and some You know, sometimes you just kind of have to take yourself away from it The third one is I want to say good product managers quite often um is really focusing on customers and product today and maybe a couple months from now it is the um Great product manager. I would say is look beyond And to say where it could take us So you would say great product managers almost like always the entrepreneur You have your first product. It's good enough And then they were going to look for the next product And then you test the next product before your first product run on the steam, right cool and cool as curve And and I would say last one is you know, I was joking talk to someone literally before today is that Someone joined a startup. He said one of your five people start off so they can just work together around table changing the world He's thinking very frustrated with you know, this company is getting bigger It's like 50 people and you know, it's hard to work with I said two problems, right? Number one, you can't change your work with only five people You could start with the five people, but ultimately you need a huge People right could be your community of millions or could be your your companies the hundreds of thousands So you have to learn not only work with while with your team. How do you bring up long? broader team other product managers for the you know, greater Mission and vision you want to go to sometimes at expense a quote-unquote on your own product area and on your shining or great features because it is the best on the overall level that Focus on some other areas, right? So that kind of selfish trade-off really helps and Really taking the product to the next level. Yeah, and I've seen this have this Thing happening with a lot of what I would call product CEOs Like like ourselves, right? We have strong opinions about the product We were product leaders before we became CEOs and in a way It's important to create a space for the product team to to shape that vision to contribute Otherwise this becomes a dictatorship where in reality the the product manager is the CEO and everyone executes on the vision And I like that you mentioned the portfolio product manager concept before when you were at PayPal because one thing I'm personally excited about is that the product team is made up of multiple team members It's not just product managers. It was come on misconception back in the day How are you thinking about product portfolio management? What is that and and how that connects with with other parts of the product team? Yeah, um, really good question a couple things that you think about so one number one is that You could be running a portfolio at least to take a portfolio approach Even if you just have one team, I kind of we challenge it before we start, right? So, uh, you know through my journey the last you know, 15 Plus years in product management. There's a shift of a product manager used to own the team over 20 engineers Right. This is unthinkable today Because the product manager is so closely worked with the others and digital products changing so quickly You have to tie it to external market and and customers So you have a smaller number of a team and you work with a lot of others So first of all is that the the size of the company and size the team require portfolio thinking is You know shrink a lot because you just work more teams that means product needs to be built by multiple teams Secondly, I would say it's portfolio is a concept That's not strictly aligned in that, you know, iphone and the macbook and those are not portfolio, right? The concept for fully coming from finance. So when you start to think about your investment Focus right think about it wherever you build a product as a growth as a mobile is whatever It's where you invest your company's resources as well You're thinking to produce something that customer wants and also good for the business, right? So the categories of product investment happens as if even if you use a one product manager and two engineers Because you have to decide Am I going to invest in existing customer? retention Delight features or i'm going to invest in growth and expansion features So now you have to decide right that's a trade-off or allocation or portfolio Do I invest in you know the longer term horizon? Do I invest in your term? So portfolio management is important skill every product manager should Start thinking about and apply to so that's why we call it responsive portfolio management because it's not the traditional portfolio management Over time you're going to manage a team you're going to manage different market segment You're going to manage different, uh, you know use cases and and and those are also like a broader concept of Portfolio could be multi-dimensional product line customer segments as well as different business goals so it's just spoiler alert actually host a mini series of When you need to shift from product management to include both the portfolio management as well in july so uh Join to our website and and and and sign up to it and cause if I can if I may You know share that information through your team will be awesome totally Yeah, and I've heard other terms that might Be related to that like product operations Right. How how is that different from what you just described? There's a lot of similarities on that so product operations relatively new Uh role right and the goal of the the role we actually work with a lot of product operations as well Back in the days is like a 12 years ago People actually had the first product operations team that works within the product team and the idea is to say Individual product team has the divisions and goals and product strategy about how we tie together So we don't build a product that looks like it built with org chart on it Right. How do we drive business forward with a different focus in different time because we cannot peanut butter our strategy How do we work with each other for consistency and so forth? So the product operation is has a very it's it's more of a role the skill sets underneath That is the real use just like a product management Is it both a role and and and and also a skill right? It's a professional skill But a lot of people also play quote-unquote product management Use that skill for other Elements or other roles as well. It's just different focus Yeah, no, it's exciting just to see the the product teams evolve and obviously there's no just silver bullet Each company will have their own definition and or but seeing that there's product operations There is product portfolio management. There is product marketing There is growth product and in general just that word that mindset that is going beyond the team Just to create that motion around the companies where you lead with a product Users can access to it before they even speak to sales I think that's just in general making the the access to information more transparent for the user right and I think that's totally true for so The ones you highlight so true, you know, what we have seen over the years We saw sales led companies You then you saw engineer led company and now we have product led company. Why because the customer Customers ultimately is who really the only reason a company exists And the customers are serviced by the product because the product, you know, you know job to be done and provide You know solve customer problems But product is not by one person and one role and one team right product manager Obviously will be connecting customers and business and design experience Product also work with the engineering process also working with the product to With the marketing to take the product to the hands of the customers So really become the quarterback and essence for companies that are product led customer focused So as the teams become more structured, there's more More, you know operations around it. Obviously ok ours has always been a key topic in organizations, right? Like How can you take that concept of objective and key results and apply it to a product team? So they become more outcome focused yeah, um interestingly That If you look at every company they have the same ok are right going to grow our revenue You're going to retire customers going to expand a new market right ultimately like a business goal What is essential and that's really product management and the ceo's become a really into one is that The product strategy really differentiate a company you take your ok are the goals to say What are our strategies to achieve them? Then you can use that strategic guidance to work with across many many product teams on How do we collectively achieve that product strategy so that the goal will provide north star? But how do we get there really is the product leadership? Focus on strategy a strategy involves and change that's important because the world changes. Nobody knows everything And product team and product leaders will be next to work with the executive and leader team to say How do we realize strategies through our product through our go-to market and so on now? I'm not saying that decision is only from an executive coming down I think anyone can come on our decision But this decision and our suggestion and suggestion has to bump on to the top Bubble up so that the strategy is aligned so that we don't you know the the whole famous story say Are you building bridge? Are you building tunnel? They both can go to the other side? But when you have multiple teams building product, we have to align how we get there before we can start digging or your layering, right? Already, yeah, thank you. Thank you. It's been awesome to chat with you to learn more about how you think about building products How you're building your own product and company. Is there anything else you would like to add? So Well, thank you very much Carlos I'm really excited to be part of the community and I think product management is it's not a new Function it's been around for a long time But with the digital with the the agile with the customer focused approach There's a huge increase in the number of product managers previously Maybe you know, we have a small number of product managers are a lot new coming in having a community continuous learning And also like you said it reach out right and that's where we're going to learn and help each other So, um, you know, I will take you that, you know, we're We're here Dragon Ball's mission is to empower successful product organizations And you know, we'll provide the trainings and and they have a to You know provide the input and the help as needed I know you do and thank you for for giving back to the community again. Take care. Thank you