What is the Product Operating Model and who has successfully applied it?
The adoption of a Product Operating Model (POM) has emerged as a critical strategy for organizations seeking to compete in an era defined by rapid technological advancement and shifting customer expectations. This report examines five companies across industries—financial services, healthcare, technology, media, and hospitality—that successfully transitioned to a POM, analyzing their implementation strategies, challenges, and outcomes.
By synthesizing insights from real-world transformations, this study identifies common principles and tactical approaches that enabled these organizations to accelerate innovation, improve operational efficiency, and create sustained competitive advantage.
Estimation is a wasteful activity once your teams are predictable
There can be lots of excitement and enthusiasm to cut out estimation altogether. But without the right conditions, it falls apart very quickly, and people revert back to expecting estimates.
Don’t use the Spotify model to speed up delivery
Many organisations followed down the path of the “Spotify Model” by adopting the roles and org structure, hoping and expecting that would make teams faster.
In many cases, nothing has actually changed except for some people’s titles. Oh, and “Squads, Guilds and Chapters.” The hierarchy remains the same. The responsibilities remain the same. The work remain the same. Nothing important changed.
Is your company good at Agile but bad at delivery?
Organisations have realised that Scrum is no good at long-term planning, estimation and scheduling. Things that senior leaders expect of their software delivery teams. Scrum makes no promises about completing a project on time, because it takes a short-term, iterative view of work. Scope expands to satisfy the customer. So either scope expands and the time allocated to the project is variable, or time is fixed, and the completable scope is largely fixed as a result.
Why are our projects always running late?
The reason your projects are constantly running late is because of the push to get more work done.
Managers see an idle worker, or idle team, and they see waste. They go about remediating that waste by assigning more work.
That worker was idle because of blocked flow, and an indetermine wait time to become unblocked. Now that worker has additional work that takes them away from the original work.
How are you improving your organisation's overall delivery capability?
You're improving your Agile / Scrum / Kanban - great.
But what are you doing to improve your organisation's overall delivery capability?