central

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 …

Read more

Visualizing Portfolio Flow (Or Lack Thereof)

You can’t improve what you can’t see. Improving flow at the portfolio level requires seeing it first.  How do you see? A Portfolio-level Kanban is a common way to start seeing.  Let’s explore what that looks like Let’s discuss how work flows at this level (Definition of Workflow as described in the Kanban Guide) The …

Read more

Expensive Problems >> Principles >> Practices

End-to-end flow of value Continuous Improvement Autonomy and Empowerment Organizing Around Value Sustainable Pace Alignment around Outcome-oriented Goals Energized People Leaders who Serve Speed and Empiricism All worthy Agility Principles (at least I think so…)  But why should anyone care?  I mean, it’s much healthier to focus on principles than practices as a goal.  But …

Read more

What Happened to Agile? And Where Do We Go From Here

Let’s be honest. These are “interesting” times for being an agilist. Whether you’re in the “Agile is Dead” camp or not, it is clear that the movement is not well. Agile took over the software development world in a storm. As that happened, the demand for agile outstripped the supply. Agile became practice-focused. A commodity. …

Read more

Agile Marketing – Gateway to Wider Agility

Agile marketing helps marketing organizations develop better campaigns faster. It helps marketers find sustainable pace and flow in the hectic marketing world by leveraging Scrum and Kanban. Team members act as “Mini CMOs” – thinking cross-functionally and are empowered to deliver results. BUT When there’s a problem or opportunity requiring collaboration with other functions… Agile …

Read more

Product Revisited

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 …

Read more

Product Operations – A Key Ingredient in your Product Journey

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 …

Read more

Developing your Product-oriented Portfolio Using a Product-oriented Approach

Three members of a PMO are asked what they are doing: Since we’re talking about a Product-oriented Portfolio, it makes sense to treat developing it as a Product Initiative. Making sure we’re focused on outcomes, rather than checkboxes.  We might use patterns and frameworks (such as a Kanban Board, OKRs, and Portfolio Reviews), but we …

Read more

Embarking on Your Product-Oriented Lean Portfolio Management Journey

Are you at the stage where traditional portfolio-level processes and behaviors present the most significant impediment to agility? I see this often. The organization spends six or seven-figure amounts on an agile transformation.  Teams and Teams of Teams are working in Agile/Scrum/SAFe.  Still, the promised land of outsized value creation and improvement of time to …

Read more

Using the PMF Survey to gauge Company Fit For Purpose

How would you feel if you could no longer work the way we work here? Sean Ellis, the OG Growth Hacker, came up with the PMF survey question, which has become one of (if not the) established ways to gauge Product Market Fit: If more than 40% of your existing customers answer “Very Disappointed,” you …

Read more