Next Steps Towards Product Portfolio Agility
Before improving portfolio agility, you need an honest read on where you actually are. A practical assessment framework for product portfolios — covering funding, flow, autonomy, and outcome-orientation.
You’re actively managing the flow of your most significant investments.
You’ve started conversations about how to descale by organizing around products.
What’s next?
It depends. Where do you want to improve? Outcome orientation? Aligned Autonomy? Sustainable Pace? Predictability? Empiricism?
The principles of agility apply at the portfolio level as well. A principle-based assessment can help you see where you are and support a structured conversation about where to go next.
Just make sure to discuss WHY you believe improving in a certain area makes sense. What would be the impact, how does that support your strategic transformational goals.
This is also where the journey becomes less structured. A Choose your own adventure.
Here are some example paths -
When portfolio leaders wanted to improve empiricism and reduce investment risk we improved the definition of workflow to better reflect and encourage product discovery behaviors and introduced a key decision whether to go through discovery or skip it straight to delivery.
When a product leader wanted to empower product teams, even when working on the most significant initiatives, we emphasized structuring these initiatives around outcomes, using OKR language instead of classic PRDs and business cases.
When an enterprise was struggling with unsustainable pace, a key intervention was a portfolio planning exercise inspired by agile planning techniques, where the different involved product groups got together and collaborated on creating a realistic portfolio roadmap using pull mode.
In a large enterprise with multiple portfolios, we tackled some common patterns across the enterprise, and other challenges that were more specific to one portfolio. For example, a Technology Services portfolio focused on applying product thinking to enabling work and identifying/nurturing internal platforms - intending to minimize dependencies and synchronization needed between them and the business-facing portfolios.
What portfolio-level challenge are YOU working on? (Which of these intervention paths would you like me to explore in more depth?)
A free email course on building an agile portfolio operating model — from recognizing your portfolio to achieving true strategic flow.
Yuval Yeret helps product and tech leaders move from agile theater to evidence-informed delivery. Work with Yuval →
