Broadsign is an advertising technology platform powering businesses with leading solutions for selling and managing out-of-home media, making it easier than ever for publishers, agencies and brands to harness the power of digital out-of-home and connect with audiences across the globe.
The Challenge
Multiple teams, multiple roadmaps, and multiple tools to manage
Over the course of the last few years, Broadsign has experienced rapid growth from acquisitions, organic channels, and product expansion within the advertising ecosystem. As a result, the company made changes to the way they were structured to support their growth.
One outcome of the new structure was the development of the product operations team, which Cédric Roy stepped in to build and lead.
One of the first things Cédric quickly realized was the way the team was working wasn’t sustainable.
With multiple products in its growing portfolio and several hundred employees, teams were inevitably starting to grow in parallel silos.
As product scaled, Broadsign was using several tools to manage their roadmaps.
“We were using Roadmunk, Aha!, ClickUp, and spreadsheets for roadmapping. There was no standardized platform or roadmap visibility which created silos amongst the teams.”
With each product owner using a different tool, the team had to jump through multiple hoops to:
- Align initiatives and features with company OKRs
- Collaborate and prioritize across teams to achieve shared goals
- Spot and manage dependencies and potential blockers which often cause a lot of churn and deliver risks
- Provide visibility and transparency to executive teams and stakeholders
The Solution
Product operations + Dragonboat to enable effective growth
As the new product ops lead, one of the first things Cédric quickly realized was the way the team was working wasn’t sustainable. Since product ops is not just about improving efficiency, but being able to accelerate product portfolio outcomes, he knew if Broadsign wanted to scale and continue to grow effectively, change was needed.
“Part of my mandate as the first product operations manager was to get data out of all of our products and to build dashboards so we could better understand how our customers used our products and what the impact of our work was.
I knew we had to standardize the work that the teams were doing, and that’s ultimately why we chose Dragonboat: to have one platform for roadmapping and portfolio management that can be shared across the company and used for stakeholder updates.”
Cédric chose Dragonboat, a tool purpose-built for outcome-driven roadmapping and portfolio management. Dragonboat enabled the framework and processes to support Broadsign’s goals to drive a culture of collaboration, transparency, and alignment.
The Result
Transitioning from feature-focused roadmapping to a product portfolio strategy
Broadsign follows the outcome-focused approach of defining goals and desired outcomes first, and then deciding what actions are needed to achieve them.
“First, we find our alignment. The executives set annual goals, then the product teams look into what they want to accomplish over the year and figure out the investments. Every quarter, our product managers look at what they can do to support that annual objective.
Even as things change, everything is tied back to achieving our outcomes, and we can plan and track all of that in Dragonboat.”
Making the switch from feature-focused roadmapping to outcome roadmapping enabled Broadsign to:
- Consider all dimensions of its product portfolio including business, customers, and resources when making decisions on how to drive outcomes
- Adopt a Responsive Product Portfolio Management (Responsive PPM) approach
- Allocate resources and make informed trade off decisions across the product portfolio
- Adjust priorities and focus based on the business and market needs
- Connect roadmaps and work with company OKRs
- Create visibility with a source-of-truth, keeping teams in one place with one tool
“Using Dragonboat has made it that much easier to get aligned, bring people together, and create communication between different departments, executives, and stakeholders.”
Broadsign used a bi-directional Jira integration for Agile execution and process autonomy, ensuring its engineering teams didn’t have to change the way they worked.
The ability to link projects and make updates in real-time between Dragonboat and Jira with multiple progress tracking methods (story points, issue counts, time tracking, etc.) ensured that its product portfolio was always accurate and eliminated the need to juggle updates in multiple places.
Cross-functional work and product roadmap dependencies were also now being mapped in Dragonboat, further building on Broadsign’s culture of collaboration and visibility.
With Dragonboat, Broadsign builds outcome roadmaps to achieve multiple objectives, manage multiple teams, and provide a framework for the outcome-driven product workflow.
Key Takeaway
A central source-of-truth for product portfolio strategy, visibility, and outcomes
Now, Broadsign’s roadmaps are aligned with the company vision, teams are no longer spread across various tools, and everyone is empowered to work together to drive portfolio outcomes.
Dragonboat enables the Broadsign product team to practice outcome-focused OKR roadmapping which not only did Broadsign build a dynamic product portfolio, but it built a collaborative and high-performing organization.
Leveraging Dragonboat eliminated silos stemming from using disparate multiple tools. Dragonboat helped to sync all the deliverables, product teams, and timelines to visualize a clear path forward with product portfolio focus and alignment for their entire organization.
And best of all, after the successful product operations transformation, Cédric was recognized and promoted from Product Operations Manager to Director of Product!
Broadsign is making it easier than ever for publishers, agencies and brands to harness the power of digital out-of-home and connect with audiences across the globe. Lighting up airports, shopping malls, health clinics, street corners and more, their platform powers screens at the heart of people’s lives.
Marketing Technology
300+
Product portfolio management, outcome roadmapping, scale product operations, Jira integration for Agile execution
Product management, product operations, leadership
