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.
If you want to deliver more value, then stop using project delivery
Many organisations have successfully transitioned to Agile ways of working. They might have implemented CI/CD, DevOps and Cloud infrastructure. But guess what? Their portfolio isn't getting delivered any faster.
And the culprit? The culprit is Project orientation and Project management.
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.
Matrix organisation structure doesn’t suit modern software teams
Matrix organisations restrict skills acquisition, knowledge transfer, and portability of skills across teams and domains.
There are ways of breaking out of Matrix organisation, especially for I.T teams, and the benefits are faster teams, greater collaboration, increased cross-pollination of skills and capabilities, and many more.