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 …
“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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
I’m starting to wonder whether the current focus on Product Operating Models is a distraction from the real opportunity of applying Product Thinking. The whole conversation is about empowered product teams. There’s minimal conversation about what’s the product. Models inspired by Silicon Valley Big Tech companies focus on tech-heavy products. But what if the product …
Something clicked for me over the last couple of weeks as I’ve been sharing my reflections on what I’m seeing in the trenches when it comes to the journey towards Product Organizations and Product Operating Models. As a reminder, The vision of the Product-oriented organization is to have product teams: This is a great north …
While the Product Operating Model focuses on developing new Products, it has implications and potential benefits for the teams operating the business and supporting these products. (These work in the Operational Value Stream, as defined in SAFe.) Improving the Interface between Product Development and Business Operations The handoff point between development and operations is a common …
Shifting from projects/solutions to a product/outcomes mindset is hard. And the Names we use for our Epics / Features / Stories make it even harder. Too often than not, those names are a relic of the original ask, which is typically of the “build it and they will come” nature. Even as we work on …