The challenge: scaling startup product management in a fast growing organization
EasyPost is growing rapidly and has been expanding their startup Product Management teams to meet their increased demand. As their new teams began to build their best practices in product and portfolio management, they were faced with challenges common to scaling companies – competing product and business opportunities, cross team dependencies, difficulty in tracking progress and coordinating stakeholder communications.
Managing ideas, requests and initiatives via spreadsheets had become increasingly time consuming and error prone.
“There was no easy way to connect the 'Why' and the 'How'. The Product team needed a tool that could easily and clearly define what our objectives are, how we are going to achieve them, and where we are in our progress. We needed a tool to enable us to keep up with our company’s quick growth.”
The solution: Dragonboat as the strategic product platform
After some research, Andrew brought Dragonboat to EasyPost. With the help of Erin, the Head of Program Management, the team implemented Dragonboat as their strategic product platform.
EasyPost uses Dragonboat for their strategic and quarterly planning and as the source of truth for product roadmaps. Product Managers can clearly define objectives and strategic themes, and prioritize ideas aimed to fulfill the organization’s goals, customer opportunities, and other strategic factors.
These ideas are then T shirt sized, with dependencies cleared and prioritized for the upcoming months.
Then Program Managers take over the release planning, agile execution and stakeholder communication.
Dragonboat allows Program Managers to quickly identify risks and manage them effectively.
“My team loves the configurable views so they can easily sort and filter to exactly what they want to see on the Summary view. I have found it’s very easy to flag potential issues.”
Before, communication with different stakeholders with different needs was challenging and time consuming. Because Dragonboat allows multiple perspectives for both planning and reporting, it makes it really easy to tailor the communication with various stakeholders from Executives, to Sales, Marketing leaders and Engineering teams.
“By having the strategic goals and progress already mapped, I can quickly create and share custom reports for different stakeholders.”
Key takeaway: Dragonboat empowers a winning product organization
Dragonboat ensures alignment from start to finish, increasing transparency and collaboration between the Product teams and the rest of the organization.
By enabling collaboration between Product, Program, and Technology teams, as well as between Product Managers, Dragonboat eliminates departmental silos and surprises.
“Dragonboat enforces product management best practices both within the product teams, also educating the company. With Dragonboat, Product Managers align product features to objectives (the Why) and teams are empowered to work together to define the game plan (the How) to best achieve the objectives.”
Dragonboat is now the essential platform for EasyPost’s scaling startup product management teams, seamlessly connecting strategy with execution and portfolio alignment.
EasyPost is a Shipping API that solves complex logistics problems for eCommerce businesses, enabling them to deliver an online shopping experience that delights customers. Some of the biggest names in retail rely on EasyPost to ship faster, smarter, and cheaper. They manage the headaches involved with dated carrier technology so customers can focus on what grows their business.
Computer Software
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Business growth, startup product management, strategic planning, cross-team collaboration & dependencies, progress tracking, roadmap transparency & alignment, stakeholder communications
Product management, program management, stakeholders
