Descale Your Portfolio By Organizing Around Products

Is your Portfolio Kanban Board Busy? Do you feel like almost any outcome of any significance needs to be managed at the Portfolio level because it involves several of your product/development groups?

One solution would be to invest in better portfolio management, coordination mechanisms, etc.

A better solution would be to descale. To find ways to organize around outcomes.

The goal is to minimize the number of outcomes spanning product/development groups.

That’s the whole idea of Empowered Product Teams. Also known as Stream-aligned in Team Topologies.

Empowered means having the decision rights, resources, and skills needed to discover and deliver product outcomes with minimal dependencies.

Decision rights are meaningless without the resources and skills.

You can empower Product Managers - but if the Product Team is heavily dependent on other teams, than you’re only empowering them to negotiate and spend time in coordination nightmare, that often does flow up to the cross-product layer (also known as Portfolio…) for resolution.

When portfolio leadership teams approach me with this challenge, I guide them through:

1. Identifying the constraints - the usual suspects involved in everything. In many cases, 80% of the dependencies map to 20% of the teams…

2. Looking for product topology options that might work better.

3. Considering whether architectural interventions such as introducing a self-service platform can help melt some of the iron spaghetti.

4. Considering aggressive cross-product T-shaping - enabling people/teams to do work currently limited to specific, constrained teams.

We then compare the different design options (as well as the current state) based on:

• How much of the portfolio’s work will be localized using this option? Aim for the majority of the work to be localized. If possible, 80% would be even better.

• How much of a change from the current state is this option? Change is hard…?

• How much product/technology/people risks does this option entail (e.g., distributing a core capability with limited know-how)?

• How future-proof is this option? How aligned is it with our strategy? What’s on the horizon?

When we find a significantly better alternative worth exploring, we evolve it like a product - we clarify the desired outcomes and leading indicators, agree on a discovery approach, and tackle it incrementally if possible.

And yes, this is a fractal of how you could tackle a product group that is facing too many dependencies, which is a fractal of how you improve the resiliency and flow on an empowered product team.

Or, in other words - “Turtles all the way down”