Product-Oriented Portfolio Leader

What does Product Oriented Portfolio Leadership Look like? These leaders …

• Model agile leadership by fostering collaboration, decentralized decision-making, and servant leadership to inspire trust and empower teams.

• Align portfolio objectives, vision, and strategies with organizational goals, ensuring they are outcome-oriented, measurable and continuously updated to reflect strategic needs.

• Organize value streams and teams around products and strategic themes in a way which empowers them to run fast with minimal dependencies and maximum local decision making leading to fast learning and improving the likelihood of great product outcomes.

• Optimize portfolio processes to ensure smooth flow, align governance with lean principles, and promote a sustainable pace for long-term health and efficiency.

• Proactively mitigate risks through empiricism, experimentation, and evidence-based decision making.

• Model Focus, Flow, Outcome-orientation and Empiricism in how the organization’s most significant initiatives are considered and managed.

Does this look familiar?

Honestly, You could come up with this list yourself. All I did was think through what it would look like to apply the Agility Principles for Portfolio Leaders.

But I think its a nice example of the power of starting with principles rather than mechanics/practices.

Does it make sense for Portfolio Leaders to use Portfolio Kanbans? Epics? OKRs? Guardrails/Boundaries? Team Topologies? Very often it does. But these are all much more powerful when you start with the intent and then choose what works in the context.

So, instead of a checklist of practices you’re using (or not) - how about reflecting on whether leadership behaviors are aligned with agility principles?

(FWIW That’s the model I’m using when coaching/mentoring leaders - whether they consider themselves portfolio leaders or not…)