From Project to Product to Problem-Solving

As businesses become increasingly digital and product driven, companies are pivoting to product-centric operating models. The backbone of such models is a network of teams aligned to a set of value streams and empowered to set their own objectives and paths to achieving them. Unlike project-driven companies, which are driven by temporary endeavors with predefined scopes, product-centric companies organize people and goals around products that continuously deliver value to customers.

While much more agile than their project-based predecessors, product-based organizations face two common execution challenges. First, maintaining continuous alignment among multiple autonomous product teams is a daunting task. Leaders’ perspectives on what is important is likely to vary based on the products they lead. To their teams, it can be very frustrating when a corporate-level initiative disrupts their local prioritization processes, causing them to pull focus from what is most important for the product to what is most important for the business.

Second, even with the most thoughtfully designed value streams, some dependencies between products typically remain. When dependencies cannot be decoupled, product teams must negotiate whose roadmap will be compromised, which is a challenging exercise in the absence of a larger, global prioritization framework

What's inside

• Successful Scaling — This paper focuses on how product-centric organizations can maintain success by clearly scaling and maintaining visibility.
• Expert Authors — This paper is written by experienced leaders across industries who have led project to product transformations.
• Patterns and Antipatterns — This paper helps readers understand and apply the lessons to their organizations through the use of clear patterns and antipatterns (called accelerating and decelerating factors).
• All Levels — Change Agents can come from anywhere on the org chart. This paper directly provides guidance on how to lead change no matter your role or title.