Portfolio Agility

Are Your Traditional Portfolio Processes Inhibiting Innovation and Agility?

You spent six or seven-figure amounts on an agile or product transformation. Teams and Teams of Teams are working in Agile/Scrum/SAFe.

Still, the promised land of outsized value creation and improvement of time to market (rather than flow time of stories or “features”) is elusive.

Looking at the conversations around budget, governance, and driving your significant business initiatives, agility is the last term that comes to mind (bureaucracy and large ship struggling to maneuver are more apt descriptions)

Decision Paralysis: Uncertainty brings your business to a standstill. Teams operate in silos, unable to adapt or innovate.

Missed Opportunities: You see competitors pivot and innovate while your organization struggles to maintain the status quo. Your phased gate process is intended to bring order, discipline, and reduce risk – but it doesn’t prevent building the wrong thing, just slows the process down.

Cross-functional Hell: Despite creating “Agile” teams, every meaningful innovation/transformation requires heavy collaboration – becoming a “project” or “program”.

Do You Want To Improve Portfolio Agility But Are Afraid Of Heavy Agile Processes

You’ve heard of Lean Portfolio Management (LPM). You like some of the principles and practices, but the framework seems too heavy for your context.

You envision finding a leaner portfolio operating system that orients around outcomes, where the right people collaborate closely with each other, where people naturally and efficiently integrate and experiment, and where there’s a goldilocks mix of alignment, autonomy, and guardrails.

You’re looking for a leaner, more agile, portfolio operating system.

Leaner Portfolio Management – Bringing Product and Agility to the Portfolio

Leaner Portfolio Management is about transforming your IT portfolio from a feature factory managing scattered investments to creating a product-oriented mega-lab that drives growth, value, and resilience.

It is the application of the same concepts that work at the Team/Product level, to the Cross-Product / Organizational level. (You can think of it as a Fractal, or “Turtles all the way” perspective)

The Road To Portfolio Agility

You can think about the journey to a product-oriented portfolio in four stages: Crawl, Walk, Run, and Fly.

Each stage helps your organization evolve towards agility, evidence-based decision-making, and continuous alignment.

Crawl: You start by recognizing that you already have a portfolio of investments, even if it’s not formalized. In this stage, you start to understand your portfolio and the flow (or lack thereof) of your significant investments.

Walk: Begin actively managing the flow and shaping demand. (Saying No, or not yet) It’s about turning a collection of projects into cohesive products—creating an intentional balance between technology and business investments. We are starting to have conversations around which decisions to manage at the portfolio level and which to empower product teams to have.

Run: Now, it’s about aligned autonomy. Teams are free to innovate, while strategic goals keep everyone focused on the outcomes that matter. Stable funding decoupled from product cycles helps teams thrive without constant budget concerns.

Fly: Finally; you’re in full agility mode—treating your entire business like a product. Lean Startup principles guide how you adapt and grow, and every aspect of the industry evolves in response to real-world feedback.

This journey isn’t about frameworks or processes—it’s about behaviors.

In the early stages, it is focused on establishing flow. Then, it is about reorganizing around value and outcomes and eventually being evidence-informed.