Today we are excited to announce a $3M seed funding by Act One Ventures, Roble Ventures, and Gingerbread Capital, with the participation of strategic angels who have founded and scaled unicorn companies, including Rob Hull (co-founder of Adaptive Insights), Eddie Machaalani (co-Founder of BigCommerce), and Nuno Sebastiao (co-Founder of Feedzai).
Dragonboat is an integrated portfolio platform empowering product organizations to deliver both customer delight and business results. Since launching in 2020, Dragonboat has been adopted by 1,000+ teams in over 20 countries.
Product management is not a new profession, but as software is eating the world, the need for digital product management has exploded. Additionally, the rapid rise of distributed product and tech teams has further accelerated the need for product operations and an integrated system to align, plan, deliver and adapt products holistically.
Building Product is a Complex Business
Every product leader faces the challenge of empowering autonomous teams to innovate while ensuring the right product gets built with the right experience, at the right time, from an overall portfolio perspective.
The decentralization of decision-making means strategic context needs to be understood across all levels, visibility is required across continents, and teams must collaborate cross-functionally to connect business, customer and product goals. And when changes happen, trade-offs need to be made with a clear understanding of impact to act fast without failing other parts of the business.
“As we operate in a fast changing market, making the right product and resourcing decisions while understanding the downstream implications is critical. Dragonboat enables us to have a complete view of business goals, customer needs and portfolio allocation. It helps us make the best product decisions while keeping everyone on the same page.”
Rajesh Venkatesh, Chief Product Officer, Nium
Product Teams Need to Balance Customer Needs and Business Goals
Most product teams start by focusing on product management skills such as collecting customer feedback, running product discovery, and iterating on experiences. When their role expands to lead product organizations that drive business outcomes, they have to achieve both near-term results and long-term vision. The need to juggle competing priorities with a data-driven, holistic approach has become ever more acute.
“As a product manager, I focus on customer wants and needs. As a product leader, I’m also responsible for business objectives. A product leader needs to help all adjacent functions succeed, which in turn helps the company succeed. Dragonboat helps me effectively make product portfolio decisions, enabling alignment, transparency and trust across the company.”
Janette Chung, Chief Product Officer, Copper
Product Teams Need to Work Together, Not in Silos
Digital products are usually built by multiple teams and inevitably have dependencies. Working across teams to align and collaborate product experience, technical approach and release schedules is time-consuming, especially when the “plan” can change so frequently. Teams often work around this challenge by trying to build everything within their own teams, causing tech debt and “org-chart painted product experiences”. Or they have to rely on the sheer effort by product ops, program managers, or their own time on project management tasks.
“Dragonboat provides a holistic view of the product and tech organizations from both an outcome and resources perspective which is key to any team that is serious about effective Product Operations. What used to take teams weeks to create can now be ready in seconds.”
Tami Reiss, Product Leader Coach, Advisor, and angel investor in Dragonboat
There is a Way to Run Outcome-Focused Product Organizations
Through leading and scaling multiple companies into unicorn status, we at Dragonboat know there is a way to lead outcome-focused product organizations, holistically and autonomously. That’s why we started Dragonboat – to bring solutions that were once only available to these leading companies to the rest of the world.
“We need the right solution for portfolio management to connect roadmaps with OKRs and run our quarterly planning and tracking. After I evaluated 25 tools, I finally found Dragonboat – the only tool that suits all our use cases and is flexible enough to at the same time to fit our ways of working, not enforcing us to follow the predefined framework. Finally, we can get rid of tons of tools and formats to keep all our product portfolio data transparent and up-to-date.”
Anton Zhvakin, Senior Manager of Product Development Operations, Miro
Big Thanks to Our Customers and Partners!
We’re more than just a tool, we’re a community.
Product management and product operations are among the fastest-growing job categories in tech. We’re passionate about building a community on responsive product portfolio management for product and portfolio leaders to share learnings and help each other to build outcome-driven product teams.
Thanks to the amazing feedback and support from our customers, we’ve been growing rapidly at 300% YoY in 2021, with customers including Chime, F5 Networks, Rapyd, Miro and Nium.
“Dragonboat provides the strategic framework and scalable platform for CPOs and their teams to drive real business impact. Every function has a system for data-driven decisions. Sales has Salesforce. Engineering has Jira. Customer Success has Zendesk. Product will have Dragonboat.”
Tom Bogan, Former CEO of Adaptive Insight and angel investor in Dragonboat
None of this would be possible without your support. We are honored you lead your product portfolio operations via Dragonboat.
Let’s Make Waves
With this new round of funding, we’ll grow our team across all functions in the US and Portugal.
We aim to accelerate our product innovation and provide the best-in-class tool for product leaders and teams to delight their customers while achieving business results.
Check out the full press release here.
