Tealium is the leader in real-time customer data orchestration solutions and enterprise tag management, connecting customer data across web, mobile, offline, and IoT for more than 850 companies including Domino’s, Gap Inc., IBM, Molekule, and more.
The Challenge
Building product ops from ground zero
As Tealium juggled strategic decision making, customer problems, team alignment, idea management, enablement and training for stakeholders – you name it – the need for operational efficiency and processes to enable product and go-to-market teams became an essential, yet missing piece of its business strategy.
Thus, the need arose for building and scaling product operations.
“I was the first hire when the product organization actually started at Tealium, to help put some rigor around how we were working. We were building from the ground up, and our focus was really on operational efficiency and foundational processes – how do we do what we do, but do it smarter, faster, and better? And with the least amount of admin overhead possible, while also trying to help PMs focus on solving customer problems, making strategic decisions, and not have to be in the weeds and worry about how to get things done?”
The why and the need for product ops:
- Improve go-to-market processes & enablement
- Establish framework for operational efficiency
- Align teams & enable cross-team collaboration
- Create end-to-end roadmap strategy with visibility
“Our challenges were evolving and getting more complicated, which is what led us to Dragonboat, as we continued to build and started scaling product operations. How can we have a better picture of our end-to-end organizational portfolio roadmap? How do we operationalize the artifacts that PMs need to create along the way for discovery and research? And not as a means to be prescriptive, but giving them tools to help guide them and have a foundational standard of how our product management organization operates.”
The Solution
Finding the right roadmapping and product portfolio platform to drive outcomes
One of Tealium’s first initiatives as part of scaling product ops, was to find a tool to enable outcome-based decision making and provide roadmap visibility.
“There was a lot of feeling like things would go into a ‘black box’, and no one would know what was coming out the other side and when. We needed a way to enable smarter outcome-based decisions and general visibility with the roadmap.”
What Tealium was looking for in a portfolio management tool:
- Single source of truth for idea management & planning
- Make smarter, outcome-based decisions
- Provide senior leadership visibility into investments made
- Streamline status & cross-functional transparency
- Improve confidence with better resource estimation & planning
Tealium ultimately ended up choosing Dragonboat for several reasons, the main one being that “it was one, if not the only, solution that actually focused on outcome-based decision elements, allowing us to tie our feature ideas directly to our company OKRs and product objectives,” Jackie mentioned.
Being able to connect goals with strategy and execution then gave Tealium the ability to “slice and dice” their data, and create tailored reports for different stakeholders, such as senior leadership to show where investments were being made against the goals for the company.
The bi-directional Jira integration was also a huge factor for Tealium, since all the other tools they looked at had limiting one-way integrations where you could push things to Jira, but it wouldn’t sync back. Dragonboat’s flexible and robust integration with Jira allows Tealium’s product team to do what it needs to do, how they need to do it in Dragonboat, without having to ask their engineering team to change how it operates and works day to day.
“Knowing the connectivity is there, and the data is always going to be in sync was a really big thing for us. It really felt more like a partnership than a vendor-customer relationship. And knowing that you guys would be there to help me figure out the right way and best practices, and you were invested in my success as much as I was.”
The Result
Establishing a strategic framework that became Tealium’s foundation & key for growth & development
Tealium now had a single source of truth for its organizational level portfolio management, health, and status.
How Tealium’s teams use Dragonboat today:
- Product management uses it to score, rank, and plan initiatives
- Marketing can see roadmaps & timelines to strategize & plan their calendar
- All senior leadership can access & view dynamic reports
- Bi-weekly engineering + product leadership meetings to look at dashboards & health
"It really did check that box completely, of providing visibility throughout the organization from a single place, and not having multiple different status documents in multiple different places where you just can't trust the information because you don't know how outdated it is. Everything is centralized."
Key Takeaway
For building & scaling product operations, the right tool enables the right outcomes
Having a strategic set of goals in mind paired with the right tool has enabled Tealium to focus on outcome-driven results and synchronous work. Tealium has a single source of truth for everyone with visibility and alignment across the board, so people don’t have to “ask 100 people 100 different questions, and they can start to link things together themselves,” explained Jackie.
With Dragonboat, Tealium has been able to scale operational efficiencies and create a foundational strategic framework that will be its key for future growth and development, especially as the product evolves with the maturity of its ground-zero product ops function.
Tealium has been at the forefront of delivering trusted customer data orchestration for over a decade, and their ability to help companies leverage and fuel customer experiences will only continue to expand from here on out.
Tealium connects customer data across web, mobile, offline, and IoT so businesses can better connect with their customers. Tealium’s turnkey integration ecosystem supports more than 1,300 built-in connections, empowering brands to create a complete, real-time customer data infrastructure. Tealium’s solutions include a customer data platform with machine learning, tag management, an API hub and data management solutions that make customer data more valuable, actionable, privacy-compliant and secure. More than 850 leading businesses throughout the world trust Tealium to power their customer data strategies.
Marketing Technology
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Outcome-based decision making, scale operational efficiencies, source of truth for idea management & planning, roadmap visibility
Product operations, product management, leadership, marketing
