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What Do You Do When OKRs Become Too Much Administrative Work?

Does it ever feel like OKRs are too much overhead? Does it make sense that OKRs will only work when “We we will have more people to manage them”? Let’s be honest – OKRs can sometimes feel a bit heavy: If you’re tempted to hire a PMO to manage your OKRs because they’ve become too …

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How To Shift from Project to Product at the Portfolio level – A Scrum.org Community Q&A Podcast

A major focus for me these days is helping Leaders who set out to shift their organizations from a project to a product mindset figure out how to scale product orientation to a multi-product environment. They want to apply product thinking to their strategic initiatives that cut across products and beyond the product organization. This …

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How Can We Nudge a Product Team To Be More Flexible?

What do you do when a product team’s capabilities aren’t aligned with strategic priorities? This is a common challenge for product/portfolio leaders. On the one hand – a product-oriented operating model talks about empowered, stable product teams. On the other hand – we want to focus on maximizing outcomes. What if a product is good …

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Pushing The Boundaries of a Product Portfolio

“We have to have this product capability – it’s a key element of this business initiative we already committed to.” The essence of the Product Operating Model is to empower product teams to achieve outcomes without prescribing to them what outputs to deliver. I often encounter organizations who adopt a Product Operating Model as an …

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When and How To Organize Your Agile Release Trains (ARTs)

The idea of bringing dependent teams together to collaborate better and minimize cross-dependency overhead isn’t unique to SAFe. It’s just a fractal of the pattern of an agile cross-functional team, which Agile hasn’t invented either, just leveraged. Here’s how you might go about designing effective ARTs: There will still be dependencies. Sometimes, even a lot. …

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How To Manage a Product Transformation Project

For the fun of it – the next time a big consultancy gives a big presentation to your organization, pitching a POM – ask them how they recommend managing this transformation. And see if what they describe looks more like a Project or a Product. For example – Will they measure vanity metrics or product …

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From Blueprints To Trail Maps

When implementing agile portfolio management, leaders’ first—and often most daunting—question is: “Where do we start?” I’ve taught my share of frameworks. In some cases, a comprehensive blueprint or roadmap makes sense. They feel safer to people from traditional project/program management – who ARE often the exact people leading the move towards agile ways of working, …

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Cross-Product Initiative Ownership

Many organizations tackling cross-product initiatives struggle with initiative ownership. At its heart, a cross-product initiative involves significant impact across multiple products/groups (sometimes called a portfolio) As organizations scale up, they get to the point where they need to tackle cross-product/cross-organization initiatives. These are often significant, complex endeavors aimed at solving an expensive problem or opening …

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Organizational Traction w/ an OKRs Kanban

What gets measured gets managed. But setting OKRs isn’t enough. The flow and traction of OKRs need to be managed as well – otherwise, you’ll find yourself in the OKR swamp. Using an OKR Kanban can help you both see the swamp and improve the flow and traction of OKRs. Here’s an example – Here …

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What’s The Right Timing For Portfolio Agility?

Most organizations wait way too long to adopt some portfolio-level agility practices.  They’ve been told, “You can’t scale what’s broken,” so they wait until they nail agile at the team and product group level.  What if fixing what’s broken REQUIRES focusing on the upstream that’s shaping the work and context of these teams?   Back in …

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