What Do Busy Portfolio Kanban Boards Tell Us?

They tell us a story of slow, centralized decision-making, often related to classic program management culture combined with an iron spaghetti portfolio where delivering product outcomes often requires wide collaboration across teams and even teams of teams.

An agile, product-oriented portfolio relies mainly on providing strategic guidance and alignment, not managing every Portfolio Kanban board investment.

This is why, once you establish a Portfolio Kanban board to see the investments you’re managing, you should think about whether you actually NEED to manage these investments at the portfolio level.

It might be time to inspect and adapt the definition of portfolio workflow - focusing on which items should flow at the Portfolio level.

A few elements we often consider are - 

1. investment size 

2. Strategic opportunity/risk

3. Level of cross-product collaboration needed

Essentially, we want the portfolio conversations to focus on the larger, higher opportunity/risk high cross-product collaboration investments, and decentralize decision making to empowered product teams for other investments. 

It doesn’t mean portfolio leaders don’t care about these other investments. But they trust their product teams and maintain a lighter touch interface, compared to those investments they want to focus on. 

Here’s what you can do - 

Analyze the cards on your portfolio kanban according to these 3 criteria. Let’s say a grade of 1-3 for each. This means the overall grade for each investment/card will be between 3-9:

• 3-4 This should probably NOT be a portfolio level card. 

• 5-6 Let’s have a conversation about whether we want to track these

• 7-9 This SHOULD be a portfolio level card. 

(feel free to add a criteria and use whatever formula works for you - I provide this here just for illustration purposes)

What if it turns out most of your cards SHOULD be portfolio-level cards? One option is that you’re running a good portfolio approach already with empowered stream-aligned product teams working on smaller, more focused investments most of the time. 

But if you have lots of cards AND it looks like they should stay at the portfolio level - now its time to think about how to descale your portfolio by organizing around products, and building products using continuous discovery. (in other words, it is time to continue your product portfolio agility journey…)

What does your Portfolio Kanban Board tell you?