Product Operating Model Transformation Creating the Strategy-Execution Connection

Research indicates that strategy implementation failure rates can reach as high as 90% (according to Harvard Business School research as quoted in the joint Planview-Economist Bridging the Gap Report). This indicates widespread misalignment between strategic intent and execution.

A common symptom of misalignment is losing to competition. If companies can’t effectively implement a strategy in tune with market demands, customers and competitors will leave them behind.

Root Causes of the Divide

A variety of internal and external factors can cause strategy-execution misalignment, including:

• Leadership focus imbalance: Business leaders are often more focused on planning than implementation, creating a natural bias toward strategy development over execution.
• Overestimating benefits: Many leaders tend to overestimate the benefits of a strategy while underestimating how a highly dynamic operating environment can dilute its potential value.
• Capability gaps: Organizations fail to achieve strategic objectives because they lack certain capabilities (such as engineering capacity) that are necessary prerequisites for successful execution. For example, according to the 2023 Project to Product State of the Industry report, business leaders believe IT teams can deliver 10X more than their actual capacity.

If your organization consistently struggles to achieve targeted strategic objectives, a product operating model could transform your outcomes.

The Role of Operating Models in Bridging the Gap

Companies that successfully bridge the strategy-implementation gap implement three interconnected capabilities throughout their operating model.

Alignment and Culture: Stakeholder alignment paired with the right product culture creates shared understanding of direction and priorities across the organization. This means establishing clear decision rights, connecting daily work to strategy, and fostering psychological safety so teams can challenge assumptions and adapt quickly. Without this foundation, even well-resourced teams work at cross-purposes.

Accountability and Intelligence: Data-driven accountability combined with smart resourcing ensures decisions are informed and resources flow toward impact. This requires defining outcome-based metrics (not just output metrics), creating feedback loops that surface problems early, and building governance structures that allocate budget and talent based on strategic bets rather than historical spend. Teams need real-time visibility into what’s working and permission to course-correct.

Agility and Enablement: Organizational agility supported by integrated technology infrastructure allows the model to adapt and scale as conditions change. This means moving beyond siloed tools and legacy systems to create connected workflows that reduce handoffs, accelerate decision-making, and give teams visibility across functions. Technology alone won’t create agility, but poor technology will kill it.

Together, these capabilities transform an operating model from a static structure into a dynamic engine for execution.

Harmonize Strategy and Execution With Planview’s Strategic Portfolio Management Solution

Planview’s Strategic Portfolio Management solution is a connective tissue for organizational strategy and execution, enabling change in these five areas:

• Cascading objectives: Organizations can cascade and roll up Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in the systems where work happens.
• Focus on outcomes: Planview emphasizes focusing on outcomes rather than outputs by leveraging cascading goals and OKRs.
• Cross-functional alignment: Planview connects strategy to execution across multiple functions to drive business outcomes across the organization.
• Dynamic planning: Planview’s scenario modeling helps you visualize trade-offs, reprioritize, and fund strategic investments incrementally based on quantifiable business outcomes.
• End-to-end visibility: Planview analyzes performance data across the organization to measure the success of strategic initiatives.

“We can make trade-offs among and across our portfolios to optimize and get the best, most efficient use of our capital. We can measure our financial risk, our financial returns, and understand why we’re investing in things.” –Associate Vice President of the Enterprise PMO, Canadian Tire

Read the full case study here: Canadian Tire Advances Strategic Portfolio Investment Planning with Planview

To move from a traditional operating model to a product operating model, organizations need to make some fundamental changes. These include, at a high level:

• Teams move from temporary project teams with fixed end dates to persistent product teams with ongoing ownership
• Success metrics evolve from “on-time, on-budget” delivery to business outcomes and customer satisfaction
• Funding shifts from annual project budgets to continuous investment in value streams (AKA product lines)
• Cross-functional teams replace matrix resource allocation
• Product managers become primary decision-makers over project managers
• Stakeholders become embedded partners rather than external approvers

A typical organization won’t implement all these changes at once; however, with every change, an organization will unlock added benefits. We recommend setting a timeline that supports full implementation, as you’ll see in the next section, to keep your progress on track.

Key Steps in Operating Model Transformation

When moving to the product operating model, plan your move by following the rough schedule below.

1. Assessment and vision (months 1-2): Analyze current state, define target model, secure executive sponsorship, and establish success criteria.
2. Design (months 2-4): Define product portfolio architecture, design team structures (5-10 people per team), establish new governance, and create product-based funding models.
3. Pilot (months 4-8): Launch 2-3 pilot products, empower teams with coaching and autonomy, test new processes, and iterate based on learnings.
4. Scale (months 8-18): Roll out in waves, build organizational capabilities through training, transform HR and finance processes, and maintain transparent communication.
5. Embed (months 18+): Institutionalize practices, establish continuous improvement mechanisms, and advance organizational maturity.

Transformation is faster or slower depending on how many people and processes have to adapt. By size, organizations can expect to be fully transformed into the product operating model by:

• 18-24 months (small organizations)
• 24-36 months (mid-size)
• 36-48+ months (large enterprises)

Organizations that underestimate this timeline or try to compress it typically encounter burnout, half-implemented processes, and reversion to old habits. Plan for the full journey.

Timeline and Expectations for Transformation Results

Cultural change takes time. Success requires patience, executive commitment, and a phased approach.

However, you should expect to see certain results as your organization is gradually transformed moving to the product operating model. For example, you may see:

• Early wins around months 3-6: Increased team autonomy, faster decisions, improved morale, and reduced handoffs.
• Medium-term wins during months 12-18: 30-50% reduction in time-to-market, improved customer satisfaction, better resource utilization, and measurable product performance gains.
• Long-term wins by months 24-36+: Sustainable competitive advantage through innovation speed and market responsiveness.

Manage Complex Change With Planview’s Transformation Framework and Roadmapping Capabilities

Planview’s transformation framework and roadmapping capabilities provide organizations with a structured yet flexible approach to managing complex change. The technology integrates strategic planning, portfolio management, and execution monitoring—which enables leaders to translate high-level strategic intent into actionable and sequenced initiatives. You gain the real-time visibility and adaptive flexibility you need to navigate the transformation moving to a product operating model.

“Start small, measure, iterate, and refactor.” – Dr. Mik Kersten

The differences between the old way of working and the product operating model help explain why so many strategies fail to become reality.

The traditional, project-centric operating model is made for predictability and control. When change is slow, dependencies are limited, and technology is primarily a cost center, the model works reasonably well. In the agentic AI era, that same model is a drag on strategic execution: Teams are created and wound down based on the project, knowledge is lost between initiatives, and funding follows documents rather than outcomes. All of this constrains strategy execution.

The product operating model is focused on structured adaptability. Its primary mechanism for delivery strategy is the ongoing ability to create, evolve, and retire products. It rewires where people are focused and how time, money, and decisions flow through the organization, enabling execution to follow strategy.

Key Differences Between Models Affecting Strategy-Execution Alignment

The mechanics of each model help explain why strategy either spreads or stalls.

Time horizon

How long teams stay together and what they own over time determines whether strategy compounds or resets with every new initiative.

• Projects: Time-bounded efforts with fixed start and end dates. Teams dissolve when the project is “done,” even if outcomes are still emerging.
• Products: Persistent teams continuously evolving a capability, journey, or experience over its lifecycle. Strategy is delivered through ongoing iteration instead of one-off pushes.

Success metrics

What is measured becomes what teams optimize for, which is why metric design is one of the biggest levers for aligning execution with strategy.

• Projects: Performance judged on delivery promises—on-time, on-budget, in-scope. Success can be declared even when customer or business impact is unclear.
• Products: In a product operating model, success is measured by sustained business and customer outcomes—growth, retention, satisfaction, product health, and contribution to strategic objectives.

Funding approach

Shifting how funding flows is often the first real signal that a transformation is moving from theory to practice.

• Projects: Capital and operating budgets are allocated to individual initiatives via business cases. Funding is often front-loaded and difficult to reallocate as conditions change.
• Products: Investment flows into value streams and products with ongoing budgets. Funding can be adjusted incrementally based on performance and evolving strategy.

Team structure

The way teams are formed dictates collaboration, accountability, and the organization’s true capacity for change.

• Projects: Matrixed resourcing draws people from functional pools. Individuals juggle multiple initiatives, creating context switching and diffused accountability.
• Products: Dedicated cross-functional teams (product, engineering, design, data, operations) own an outcome end-to-end. They operate with clear boundaries and aligned incentives.

Accountability

Ownership models influence how deeply teams invest in long-term outcomes versus short-term delivery targets.

• Projects: Project managers are accountable for milestones and deliverables, but not always for long-term business results. Ownership is fragmented once the project closes.
• Products: Product managers and their teams are accountable for ongoing performance and strategic contribution of their domain. Ownership persists as strategy evolves in the product operating model.

Decision-making

Governance models determine how fast the organization can learn, adapt, and respond as conditions change.

• Projects: Governance is organized around gates, status reports, and formal approvals. Escalations are frequent; decisions often sit with committees far from the work.
• Products: Governance sets strategic guardrails; teams make daily decisions within those boundaries. Leaders steer by outcomes and metrics instead of activity and output.

“Planview helps us turn strategy into project deliverables.” – PMO Lead & PPM Platform Owner, Endress+Hauser

Read the full case study: Strategy implementation thanks to comprehensive networking: Endress+Hauser optimizes project portfolio management and improves collaboration

Benefits of Shifting to Product Orientation

A product-centric model directly addresses the strategy-execution gap described earlier. Organizations transformed by moving to the product operating model often have these characteristics:

Faster at responding to strategic shifts: Persistent teams reduce startup/shutdown overhead and can reorient backlogs quickly when priorities change. Organizations commonly see 30-50% faster time-to-market as handoffs and approvals drop.

Sharper customer focus: In a product operating model, direct feedback loops with customers and users mean strategic intents—like “improve digital adoption” or “expand into new segments”—are tested and refined in real usage, not just in plans.

Higher team engagement and stability: Clear ownership, sustained missions, and visible impact improve retention and performance, reducing reliance on “hero” efforts at project end.

Clearer understanding of where to invest: Products become financial entities with transparent ROI, making it easier to decide where to double down, where to pivot, and what to sunset.

Reduced structural waste: Eliminating repetitive project overhead (initiation, handover, re-education) and minimizing context switching frees capacity to decide which problems to solve—focusing on the work that actually moves strategic metrics.

Challenges in Making the Shift

The move from projects to a product operating model has to be a strategic transformation, not an org-chart reshuffle. Otherwise, you’ll face difficulties overcoming these challenges, such as:

Cultural resistance: Ways of working, identities, and success stories have been built around project delivery. “We’ve always done it this way” is a powerful undercurrent.

Funding model friction: Finance processes built for project capitalization and annual cycles often conflict with continuous product funding and rolling reallocation.

Skills and mindset gaps: Outcome-oriented product management, inspired and empowered engineering leadership, and data-driven decision-making may not yet be embedded capabilities.

Complexity management: As products and value streams multiply, organizations must maintain alignment across shared platforms, common data, and cross-team dependencies without reverting to heavy central control.

These challenges are exactly why a deliberate approach to the product operating model, and not scattered “product thinking,” is required.

Overcome Product Operating Model Transformation Challenges With Planview’s Adaptive Capabilities

Planview lets you run project and product models side-by-side while the organization changes, maintaining visibility, governance, and adaptive resource allocation across both. Its key capabilities are designed to bridge project and product thinking so that you can preserve discipline while enabling modern product operations.

Use Planview to:

• Create a unified, portfolio-level view across both worlds. Planview supports both project and product management paradigms simultaneously.
• Enable dynamic resource and investment allocation. This allows you to maintain existing project disciplines while building new product capabilities in parallel.
• Maintain visibility and governance as organizational structures change. Unified dashboards, cross-functional resource pools, and integrated roadmapping prevent the chaos that typically accompanies transformation to a product operating model.

Once an organization has product-centric structures in place, it needs a way to translate strategic intent into the language of product decisions: Which outcomes matter, which bets to place, and how to allocate scarce capacity.

Three mechanisms do most of the heavy lifting: OKRs, portfolio management, and product roadmapping. Together they form the link between strategy and the product operating model transformed state.

OKR Frameworks and Goal Cascading

OKRs are a way to express strategy as a small set of ambitious outcomes and measurable signals of progress. In a product operating model, OKRs help align autonomous teams without prescribing every step.

“OKRs are like the nervous system, taking the signals from the brain to all parts of the body.” – Alan Manuel, GVP, Product Management, Planview

When OKRs are used well, every product team can articulate how its backlog connects to the strategy—and where to find evidence that they’re on the right track. We include best practices for OKRs below.

How to structure OKRs

• Objectives should describe meaningful business or customer outcomes.
  • Example: “Increase digital self-service adoption.”
• Key Results should define 2-5 quantifiable indicators.
  • Example: “Increase monthly active digital users by 25% in 2 quarters.”

How to set OKRs at each level

• Company leadership sets 3-5 strategic objectives per year. The intent of these objectives should cascade from leadership into organizational OKRs.
• Product portfolios and value streams define OKRs that explicitly show their contribution.
• Individual product teams shape quarterly OKRs that connect their work to those portfolio outcomes.
• Around 30-40% of OKRs should originate bottom-up to leave space for innovation and learning.

Common OKR failures to avoid

• Treating OKRs as task lists or status trackers.
• Cascading too rigidly, leaving no room for teams to interpret strategy within their context.
• Setting too many objectives, which blurs focus and turns strategy into a wish list.
• Making Key Results too easy to hit; aim for ~70% achievement to keep ambition high and learning rich.

Portfolio Management as an Alignment Tool

Portfolio management in a product-based operating model world is no longer about approving project slates—it’s about continuously allocating capacity and investment to the products and value streams that best serve strategy. Leaders should be able to see and manage:

• Strategic portfolios: Products and value streams are grouped by customer segment, journey, or strategic theme. Leaders see at a glance how much capacity is deployed against each strategic priority.
• Investment governance: Annual, set-and-forget budgets are replaced with quarterly rhythms. Leadership uses standardized performance, risk, and strategic fit data to reallocate funding where it can have the greatest impact.
• Dependency and risk management: Cross-product dependencies, especially around platforms and shared data, are made visible and actively managed, so they don’t derail strategic initiatives.
• Health monitoring: Each product has a concise “health card” including usage, customer sentiment, technical health, and financial contribution, enabling like-for-like comparisons and informed trade-offs.

Product Roadmapping for Strategic Execution

In a product operating model, roadmaps are living artifacts, not one-time promises. They are the narrative bridge between strategy and the work product teams actually deliver. Below are helpful core principles of product operating model roadmaps for teams and leaders to keep in mind.

To transform a product operating model roadmap, make it:

• Outcome-focused: Start from the problem to solve and the business/customer result to achieve. The focus shifts from fixed feature lists to “now / next / later” themes tied to specific OKRs and value hypotheses.
• Evidence-based: Incorporate research, experiments, and data into roadmap decisions.
• Flexible: Adjust quarterly as teams learn and conditions change. Regular review cycles ensure product strategy roadmaps still reflect the overarching strategy, realistic capacity, and inter-team dependencies—without reverting to heavy, gate-based project planning.
• Transparent: Share roadmaps widely to build trust and invite constructive challenge.
• Span multiple levels:
  • Portfolio roadmaps show how cross-product initiatives advance strategic themes.
  • Product roadmaps show evolution of individual products in the context of those themes.
  • Feature or delivery roadmaps (often internal) provide enough detail for planning without locking the organization into rigid commitments.

Planview Connects Strategy to Execution With OKR Capabilities

Planview prevents misalignment by making strategic priorities visible and actionable across the entire organization. Leadership can communicate the “why” behind investments and teams can understand how their work connects to company success. Here’s how Planview’s native OKR management framework works:

• Objectives cascade into team OKRs. Planview cascades strategic intent from leadership down through the organization. The company’s objectives translate into specific initiatives, programs, epics, and work items.
• Leadership and teams track OKR progress. Each layer maintains line-of-sight to strategic outcomes, ensuring that daily execution directly contributes to company objectives. Planview feeds execution reality back to leadership for realistic-goal setting.

Read Next: Everything You Need to Know About OKRs

External perspectives can validate and enrich an organization’s own product operating model design. McKinsey & Company’s published work on product centric operating models broadly reinforces the importance of linking strategy, structure, and execution.

In terms of product and operating model maturity, McKinsey has discovered that top companies have 60% greater total returns to shareholders than bottom-half companies and 16% higher operating margins. They also find that a mature product and platform operating model is strongly correlated with business performance outcomes, including 38% higher customer engagement and 37% higher brand awareness.

Executive webinar: Find out the core product operating model principles that Fortune 500s are using to transform their organizations.

Core Elements in McKinsey’s Framework

McKinsey’s framework for the product operating model has four foundational elements: North Star and strategy, product management discipline, delivery and technology, and organizational enablers. The North Star approach means an organization has a clearly articulated product vision, tightly linked to business strategy, with metrics cascading through the organization. Accountability is oriented around outcomes rather than output volume.

To successfully transform into the product operating model McKinsey also encourages organizations to:

• Carefully consider which operating archetype to use: Centralized, federated, and hybrid models provide different ways to balance consistency with autonomy. The right choice depends on maturity, industry dynamics, and the diversity of the product portfolio.
• Adopt a value stream orientation: Organizing around customer journeys and business capabilities, not systems and departments, to ensure that cross-functional teams own end-to-end outcomes.
• Try a new governance model: Lightweight, data-driven decision-making where empowered product teams and leaders manage investment using standardized health metrics instead of stage-gate project reviews.

These elements reinforce that leaders must align vision, capabilities, and culture rather than focusing solely on team topology.

Hear from McKinsey: How to Maximize Business Value Through Product Operating Models

Insights from Cross-Industry Implementations

Case studies across financial services, retail, healthcare, and telecommunications all point to similar successful results from product operating model transformation. For example:

• Financial services: Moving from channel silos to customer-journey teams reduces time-to-market and improves experience consistency, but demands close collaboration with risk and compliance from the outset.
• Retail: Shifting from IT-led projects to product teams anchored in customer insight drives adoption and revenue, especially when merchandising and operations are embedded into the teams.
• Healthcare: Persistent product teams with deep domain expertise can reconcile regulatory rigor with speed, provided patient safety remains a non-negotiable outcome metric.
• Telecommunications: Transforming legacy IT into product-oriented value streams takes longer where technical debt and vendor complexity are high, but the payoff is greater strategic agility and reduced fragmentation.

Across these industries, the most successful transformations treat the product operating model as a holistic change in how strategy is realized, not just an agile or organizational design initiative.

Lessons Learned and Best Practices

Patterns from these product operating model implementations align strongly with the earlier discussion of the strategy-execution divide. Successful implementations will:

• Start by clarifying how products map to strategy and value, not by moving boxes on an org chart.
• Treat executive sponsorship—especially from CFO and CIO—as integral to changing funding and governance.
• Invest early in true product management capability rather than relabeling existing roles.
• Use broader metrics to steer work than delivery throughput; capture outcomes and product health.
• Recognize that platform and shared services strategy is part of the operating model, not an afterthought.
• Pace the change through pilots and waves, with explicit attention to the experience and role of middle management.

How Planview’s Capabilities Complement and Extend McKinsey Methodologies

The McKinsey product operating model framework identifies the target state: What needs to change conceptually and structurally in order to implement a product operating model. However, the gap between “what the operating model should be” and “how teams really function day-to-day” is substantial.

Planview operationalizes the target state. It provides the portfolio infrastructure that lets product leaders make investment decisions, the resource management layer that enables cross-functional team formation and stability, the OKR system that cascades the North Star, and the governance workflows that replace stage-gate reviews with continuous health-metric monitoring.

McKinsey answers “what should our operating model look like?”; Planview answers “how do we sustain that operating model through execution?”

The practical difference matters most during implementation. McKinsey’s framework provides essential strategic direction on the product operating model, for example, that you need value stream teams organized around customer journeys rather than IT systems. But then the actual work begins, and operational questions like these arise:

• How do we visualize the end-to-end dependency chain across value streams?
• How do we maintain alignment as product leaders make autonomous investment decisions?
• How do we measure whether the new operating model is actually producing better outcomes than the old one?
• How do we quickly identify the bottlenecks, risks, and issues that are delaying progress?
• How do we know when we’ve truly embedded the new operating model versus simply running parallel processes?

This is where an AI-powered, end-to-end platform like Planview makes a difference. Planview provides the platform layer that makes McKinsey’s product operating model vision executable—managing the portfolio of changes, tracking capability development across teams, measuring whether the new operating model is producing better outcomes, and surfacing the inevitable conflicts and constraints that emerge during transformation.

In short, McKinsey gets the organization clear on direction; Planview helps the organization stay aligned to that direction while adapting to execution reality.

Value streams are a mechanism to translate high-level strategy into coherent flows of work that deliver value to customers. In a product operating model, they provide the structural “rails” on which strategy travels from intent to execution.

What a Value Stream Is in Practice

A value stream encompasses the end-to-end activities required to deliver a specific outcome, for example, “customer onboarding,” “payments,” or “content discovery.” Each value stream should be:

• Oriented around customer or business value, not technology layers alone
• Owned by a cross-functional, persistent group of teams
• Measured by business and customer outcomes that tie directly back to strategy

Replacing project portfolios with value stream-based structures ensures that when strategy changes, leaders can reorient investment and capacity without tearing up the organization.

Mapping Value Streams to Strategic Objectives

Creating effective value streams in a product operating model requires intentional design. There are five phases of value stream design:

1. Identification: Map customer journeys and core business capabilities; group related capabilities into a manageable number of streams (typically 5-15).
2. Ownership: Assign accountable executive sponsors for each value stream to ensure strategic clarity and unblock cross-functional issues.
3. Strategic linkage: Connect each value stream explicitly to company OKRs—for example, acquisition, retention, operational excellence—to make trade-offs visible.
4. Portfolio balancing: Classify streams by role (growth, efficiency, foundational) and allocate investment in line with strategic priorities, not just historical spend.
5. Dependency mapping: Visualize how streams depend on platforms and shared services so that cross-stream initiatives can be coordinated without undermining autonomy.

Measuring Value Stream Performance Against Goals

When you have value streams, they become the primary lens for evaluating whether the operating model is truly delivering strategy.

To measure what’s being produced in each value stream, use a consistent set of measuring mechanisms, including:

• Outcome metrics: A small set of KPIs per stream (for example, NPS, revenue, cost-to-serve, or cycle time) will tell whether the stream is fulfilling its strategic purpose.
• Flow metrics: Measures like cycle time, deployment frequency, and work-in-progress reveal how smoothly value is moving through the system.
• Health dashboards: Integrated views combine outcome, flow, quality, and team health so leaders can intervene intelligently—investing, unblocking, or pivoting as needed.

Set up review cadences for value streams. Quarterly business reviews and monthly operational reviews ensure strategy and execution remain in sync, with clear decisions on investment and priorities.

Read Next: How to Use Flow Metrics to Optimized Software Delivery

Create Visibility From One End to the Other With Planview’s Value Stream Management Solution

Organizations today struggle with a fundamental disconnect: They invest in digital transformation, yet struggle to explain why commitments slip, why costs overrun, and why talented teams become frustrated. According to McKinsey, the culprits are remarkably consistent—resourcing issues and siloed ways of working that fragment visibility and accountability across the product development lifecycle.

Planview’s value stream management platform addresses this by creating an end-to-end control panel that integrates data from your organization’s entire technology ecosystem—from strategy planning through deployment to outcome measurement—and distills it into a single, business-aligned view of software delivery.

Rather than managing projects, products, and operations as separate domains with separate metrics and separate tools, value stream management treats them as an interconnected system where work flows continuously. This fundamental shift in the product led operating model enables organizations to identify where value gets stuck, understand why commitments slip, and make targeted interventions that improve both speed and predictability.

Planview connects to 60+ development and business tools—Atlassian, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Jira, Azure, and others—automatically ingesting data from across your technology stack. Instead of manual consolidation or disconnected dashboards, Planview creates a common data model that spans the entire product delivery cycle: from strategic planning and prioritization, through product design and development, testing and deployment, to operations and customer outcomes.

This unified view reveals patterns that remain invisible when data lives in separate tools. You can see where work queues up waiting for security review, where dependencies between teams create bottlenecks, where quality issues cause rework cycles, and where capacity constraints prevent scaling. More importantly, you can measure flow end-to-end using metrics that matter: cycle time (how long from concept to customer), throughput (how much value you deliver per cycle), and lead time variability (how predictable you are).

These metrics are expressed in business language—not tool jargon—making them immediately understandable to boards, executives, and business stakeholders.

Where Planview’s value stream management solution becomes transformative for the product operating model is through Planview Anvi, an AI-powered capability that finds the needle in the haystack of thousands of data points. Rather than requiring teams to manually analyze dashboards, Anvi uses machine learning trained on insights from thousands of customers to automatically detect bottlenecks, flag risks, and recommend specific actions.

See how Anvi works in three separate scenarios:

• If security review is causing a 15-day queue in your deployment pipeline, Anvi surfaces that, quantifies its impact on time-to-market, and recommends options.
• If one team’s resource constraints are blocking three downstream teams, Anvi flags the dependency and suggests reallocation strategies.
• If rework cycles are consuming 30% of engineering capacity, Anvi identifies the quality issues causing them and recommends prevention mechanisms.

Anvi’s insights won’t be generic best practices—they’re specific to your organization’s data, your tool ecosystem, your team structure, and your constraints. Anvi learns from your historical patterns and from aggregated patterns across thousands of Planview customers, continuously improving its recommendations.

The practical impact is substantial. Organizations using value stream management typically see time-to-market improve by 25-40% within the first quarter by making bottlenecks that were invisible become visible and fixable. Predictability improves because you’re managing flow rather than fighting surprises—you know your actual delivery capacity, you understand what constrains it, and you can forecast realistically. Costs decline as waste becomes visible: unnecessary handoffs, queuing, rework, and context-switching all show up in the data and become targets for elimination.

Perhaps most importantly, talent retention improves. When teams can see the impact of their work, understand how their efforts connect to business outcomes, and experience continuous improvement rather than repeated firefighting, engagement increases.

The solution provides that visibility as the organization is transformed moving to a product operating model and creates a culture of continuous improvement—where flow metrics become shared language, where bottleneck resolution becomes collaborative problem-solving, and where teams actively participate in optimizing the system they’re part of.

Value stream management is about working smarter by making the system visible and then systematically removing the constraints that waste effort and delay value delivery.

As your organization shifts from the project to product operating model, you’ll need the right technology to enable true transformation. The operating model sets the rules of the game, but the technology determines how easy it is to play.

When tools are fragmented, requiring manual reconciliation and context switching, even strong strategies and teams will struggle. A coherent technology stack, by contrast, makes alignment the default and misalignment the exception.

Core Technology Capabilities for a Product Operating Model

To connect strategy to execution at scale, organizations typically need capabilities across several layers of technology. They’ll require:

• Product management platforms to capture customer insights, prioritize opportunities, and communicate roadmaps.
• Delivery and workflow tools to manage backlogs, sprints, and deployment pipelines, providing real-time visibility into work in progress.
• Analytics and insight systems to track user behavior, product performance, and business impact.
• Customer feedback mechanisms to continuously ingest qualitative and quantitative input from users and customers.
• Financial and capacity tools to connect teams, costs, and investments to products and value streams.

The specific tools will vary, but the aim is the same: a connected digital backbone that allows strategy, outcomes, and execution data to flow.

Integration Points Between Systems

The value of these tools increases exponentially when they’re integrated around certain workflows. Consider these five important integration points to enable the success of your product operating model:

1. Strategy to execution: OKR and planning tools sync with product management platforms, which feed prioritized work into delivery systems. This creates traceability from high-level objectives down to epics, stories, and releases.
2. Customer feedback loop: Signals from support, surveys, and in-product analytics roll back into product management tools, tagged to opportunities and hypotheses. This allows teams to prioritize based on real demand instead of assumptions.
3. Delivery to impact: Feature flags, release tracking, and analytics events are connected so that every significant change can be tied to downstream behavior and business results.
4. Financial integration: Time, capacity, and cost data roll up to product and value stream P&Ls, enabling leaders to see return on investment at the right level of granularity.
5. Cross-platform data: APIs and data warehouses integrate disparate systems so that customer, product, and feature definitions are consistent, avoiding multiple versions of truth.

With these integrated workflows, people can spend their time doing the work that matters based on the connected story, rather than having to discover a story to guide their work by reconciling data from disparate systems.

“Planview has become the communication piece that enables us to be accountable to the plan we initiated when the project was first inspired. The result is better innovation in a desired time frame with fewer pushbacks or delays.” –Director of Hygiene Health & Consumables Product, Project Management at H.B. Fuller

Read the full case study here: How H.B. Fuller Improved Product Development Efficiency and Prioritization

Data Flow for Decision-Making

When the technology ecosystem is connected in the product operating model, decision-making becomes both faster and more evidence-based. However, you’ll need to invest in making data visible. Create a selection of ways to slice the data so that every layer of the organization can see what’s working and where to improve, such as:

• Operational dashboards provide teams with day-to-day visibility into adoption, reliability, flow, and quality.
• Strategic views give leaders portfolio-level insight into which value streams and products are performing, which are at risk, and where capacity is misaligned with priorities.
• Product discovery and validation flows ensure that research, experiments, and competitive insights are captured and used to shape roadmaps.
• Performance attribution connects features and initiatives to the outcomes they were meant to influence, allowing the organization to double down on what works and stop what doesn’t.
• Predictive and AI-driven insights can then be layered on top—forecasting capacity needs, spotting at-risk customers, or identifying opportunities—once foundational data flows are in place.

Easier Data and System Management With Planview’s Integration Ecosystem and Technology Partners

Planview’s value stream management solution connects to the tools organizations already use. Rather than forcing teams to abandon their existing technology investments or manually consolidate data across disconnected systems, Planview integrates with 60+ development, operations, and business tools through a combination of pre-built connectors and open APIs.

These integrations span the entire product delivery ecosystem:

• Planning and prioritization tools (Jira, Azure DevOps, Monday.com)
• Source code and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins)
• Testing and quality platforms (Tricentis, Jama)
• Monitoring and observability tools (DataDog, New Relic)
• Service management and operations (ServiceNow)
• Financial planning (Apptio)
• Robotic process automation (UiPath)

Planview maintains deep, decade-long partnerships with major vendors including Atlassian, Microsoft, and IBM, ensuring connectors stay current with product updates and maintain high reliability. The integration architecture is designed for low operational impact—connectors run asynchronously, pulling data without disrupting the stability of source systems. This means organizations can deploy value stream management across their entire tool ecosystem without IT concerns about performance, security, or operational risk.

The power of this ecosystem approach is that data becomes portable and actionable across organizational silos.

A feature can be tracked from conception in a planning tool, through design in Jira, through development in GitHub, through testing in Tricentis, through deployment via Jenkins, through production monitoring in DataDog, and through financial tracking in Apptio—with Planview stitching all of that together into a single narrative about value delivery.

This unified view that’s essential for the product operating model’s success is impossible when data lives in separate systems; it requires a neutral, non-vendor platform that can ingest, normalize, and correlate data across tools. Planview’s connector architecture uses point-and-click configuration with no-code setup, meaning most integrations can be operational within hours rather than weeks. Pre-built, preconfigured dashboards come ready to use, generating insights within weeks and showing measurable improvements within a quarter.

The combination of broad vendor partnerships, reliable connectors, rapid deployment, and the ability to pull insights from your existing tool investments makes Planview distinct in the value stream management market.

Planview works with your technology ecosystem rather than asking you to rip-and-replace it.

Even the best-designed operating model fails without aligned leadership behaviors. Executives define the strategic narrative, shape funding and governance, and model the behaviors that either empower or constrain product teams.

Key Executive Roles in a Product Operating Model

Leaders in the C-suite play a set of distinct and important roles in implementing and maintaining the product oriented operating model. These are:

• Chief Product Officer (CPO): Owns the product vision, portfolio, and value streams. Translates strategy into coherent product bets, shapes the product management discipline, and is accountable for product outcomes and ROI.
• CTO/CIO: Acts as strategic partner (not an order taker) to ensure technical strategy, platforms, and engineering practices enable the product operating model. This tech lead works with the CPO to balance autonomy with shared standards.
• CFO: Leads the shift from project funding to product and value stream investment, designing financial controls that support continuous adjustment rather than one-time approvals.
• CEO: Sets the “why,” reinforces the importance of the product operating model, and holds the rest of the leadership team to account for behaviors that either support or undermine it.

Leaders at this level must move from reviewing activities to reviewing outcomes.

Middle Management Transformation

Middle managers experience the operating model shift most acutely. Project managers, functional leads, and delivery managers often see their traditional responsibilities change dramatically.

• What may change: New roles emerge—such as product operations, platform product management, group product leadership, engineering management. They’re focused on enabling teams, not controlling them.
• What to emphasize: Success depends on coaching, clear competency frameworks (especially any new operating model competencies required), and transparent career paths, especially during initial months of your transformation, when roles and identity can feel uncertain.
• What to watch out for: Without explicit support, middle managers may revert to old patterns: hidden approval steps, task assignment over outcome setting, and information hoarding.

Addressing this “awkward middle” is critical to maintaining momentum and ensuring that the product operating model doesn’t remain a leadership concept that never reaches the front lines.

Change Leadership Best Practices

Leadership behaviors ultimately determine whether strategy-execution alignment sticks. Focus on a core set of behaviors:

• Over-communicate the narrative: Repeatedly explain why the organization is moving to a product model, how it links to strategy, and what success looks like.
• Create visible early wins: Use a small number of piloted products or value streams to demonstrate faster delivery, clearer outcomes, and better employee experience.
• Build a coalition of advocates: Identify credible champions at all levels and equip them to influence peers and challenge misaligned behaviors.
• Acknowledge loss as well as opportunity: People are giving up familiar structures and expectations. Recognizing that shift builds trust and makes it easier to embrace the future.
• Align incentives and consequences: Update performance and reward systems to match desired behaviors, including outcome focus, cross-functional collaboration, and evidence-based decisions.
• Measure adoption, not just sentiment: Track concrete indicators—decision velocity, governance overhead, use of OKRs, and product health metrics—not just self-reported enthusiasm.

Planview Provides Executive Visibility and Governance

Executives typically lack visibility into why digital initiatives succeed or fail, why time-to-market remains unpredictable, and where investment really goes. Planview translates technical delivery into business metrics that matter: Time-to-market, predictability of commitments, cost per unit of value, and alignment between resource allocation and strategy. Executives can measure product operating model transformation ROI using real-time leading indicators rather than retrospective analysis.

For example, rather than subjective project status reports, executives see objective dashboards that reveal which product lines are delivering efficiently, which are constrained, and which require investment. When security review queuing costs three weeks of cycle time or a shared platform team blocks 40% of feature delivery, these constraints become visible and addressable.

Governance in Planview operates through automated workflows and data-driven decisions rather than periodic stage-gate reviews. For example:

• Standardized dashboards surface anomalies automatically—initiatives at risk, resource conflicts, quality issues, or blocked dependencies.
• Alerts trigger when metrics cross thresholds, enabling exception-based governance.
• Planview Anvi recommends specific actions: reallocate resources to prevent delays, implement automation to remove bottlenecks, or adjust scope to meet commitments.

Governance becomes collaborative problem-solving enabled by data rather than adversarial gate reviews. Decisions are faster, better-informed, and governance accelerates transformation instead of creating friction.

Case studies show how companies are transformed moving to the product operating model. They illustrate how strategy, structure, funding, and culture come together in real organizations—and what kinds of results are possible when alignment is achieved.

Across these stories, the through-line is consistent: once strategy is reflected in value streams, funding, roles, and metrics—and supported by leadership behaviors—execution becomes a repeatable competitive advantage, not a one-off success.

Vanguard Brings Strategy to Life

Vanguard embarked on a five-year modernization journey in 2020 to enhance digital channels and improve investor outcomes. Chief Technology Officer Mike Carr highlighted four key elements:

• Cloud Migration enabled developers faster access to infrastructure, freeing them to focus on features.
• Microservice Architecture replaced monolithic applications, allowing smaller code changes with limited impact radius, improving stability.
• Agile Reinforcement addressed gaps in CI/CD pipelines that had hampered Agile adoption since 2006, bringing comprehensive training and modern development practices.
• Product Orientation shifted from temporary project teams to stable product teams, reducing overhead and preserving expertise while enabling continuous improvement.

The results were substantial: a five-fold increase in technology change rate and 75% reduction in major incidents—demonstrating that Vanguard successfully balanced speed with stability. Customer satisfaction improved as the company used its enhanced agility to implement experience improvements aligned with investor goals.

Read the full case study here: Vanguard’s Journey from Project to Product

Parchment Rethinks the Metrics of Success

Parchment had undergone digital transformation and modernized their engineering capabilities, but they found they were still measuring progress using legacy metrics like activity and individual output, rather than outcomes. This obscured delivery bottlenecks and areas for improvement. They piloted an in-house value stream management solution for two years but the internal costs and resources demanded were unsustainable.

Parchment adopted Planview Viz to replace activity-based metrics with Flow Metrics. Their story illustrates how metrics reshape decision making. They’ve enabled end-to-end visibility into software delivery in a few key ways:

• Establish monthly metrics reviews and retrospectives, driving cross-functional engagement and conversations
• Focus teams on bottleneck resolution rather than individual productivity metrics
• Use Planview Anvi to glean new insights, derive recommendations, and initiate work-oriented actions from value stream data

“Using Planview Viz and Flow Metrics have been the most promising approach to measuring and improving delivery performance that I’ve encountered in my 24-year career.” – VP Head of Application Engineering, Parchment

Parchment plans to expand flow methodology across the organization over the next two years, with Anvi enabling real-time bottleneck identification, predictive risk analysis, and democratized data access for executives and knowledge workers.

Read the full case study here: Rethinking Metrics: A Journey from Legacy Measures to Team Success

Funding is where strategy meets reality. If investment mechanisms remain project-based while the organization attempts to be product-centric, misalignment will persist.

From Project Funding to Product Funding

Shifting funding models is a core element of product operating model transformation.

• Traditional project model: Budgets are allocated to time-bounded initiatives via detailed business cases. Once the project ends, funding stops—even if the product requires further evolution to meet strategic goals.
• Product funding model: Budgets are allocated to persistent products and value streams that represent strategic capabilities. Teams receive ongoing funding and are accountable for using it to maximize strategic and financial impact.

Transition usually happens over multiple budget cycles, starting with a subset of value streams or product lines before rolling out more broadly.

Capacity-Based Funding

A practical way to operationalize product funding is to treat teams as the unit of investment. In practice, this looks like funding capacity rather than individual projects. Leadership decides how many teams each value stream or product requires based on strategic importance and performance.

This product operating model funding approach provides three results:

• Balances structure and flexibility: Gives finance predictable cost structures while giving product leaders the flexibility needed to adapt to evolving strategy.
• Simplifies planning: With known team costs and capacity, planning focuses on outcome choices rather than detailed cost estimation per initiative.
• Enables agility: Capacity can be reallocated by shifting teams or refocusing their backlogs, without running new approval cycles for every change.

Portfolio Investment Strategies

In the product-aligned operating model, funding also becomes a way to express strategic intent across the portfolio. Leaders should adopt these four best practices for setting portfolio investments:

• Look across investment horizons: Explicitly balance resources across core (maintain and optimize), growth (expand and differentiate), and explore (new bets and innovations).
• Establish review rhythms: In the product operating model, leaders should use quarterly reviews to assess whether each product or value stream is generating the expected outcomes. Adjust capacity and funding accordingly.
• Normalize decision frameworks: Adopt standardized criteria—strategic fit, customer value, financial performance, and execution confidence—to help avoid decisions driven purely by politics or sunk cost.
• Create sunsetting rigor: Set up clear criteria and processes for retiring products to free up capacity. This prevents “zombie” offerings from absorbing investment that should move to higher-impact areas.

Planview’s Financial Planning and Investment Tracking Capabilities Enable Smart and Efficient Financial Governance

Most organizations struggle to connect financial decisions with the realities of product delivery. Budgets are created annually, work changes weekly, and leaders lack a clear view into where money is really going—or whether those investments are producing strategic outcomes. Planview closes this gap by unifying financial planning, capacity management, and portfolio decision-making.

Planview’s financial planning capabilities allow organizations to move beyond rigid, project-based budgeting. Instead of allocating large, upfront commitments to initiatives that may change within a quarter, leaders can shift to continuous product and value stream investment. Funding becomes dynamic: Teams receive ongoing investment and can adjust based on performance, risk, and evolving priorities. The platform ties these financial decisions directly to outcomes, so leaders see which products generate ROI, which require additional support, and which should be reconsidered.

This visibility is strengthened by scenario modeling that helps executives test trade-offs before committing resources. Multiple investment scenarios—different mixes of products, capabilities, and strategic bets—can be compared side-by-side. Leaders can review the capacity implications, cost envelopes, and projected outcomes of each scenario, ensuring that funding decisions are grounded in evidence rather than intuition.

“We can analyze profitability of our projects based on different budget scenarios. We can also do analyses on things like application run-time costs. –Senior Project Manager, Volvo Group Trucks Technology

Read the full case study here: The Volvo Group Drives Transformation in Enterprise Portfolios to Support the Global Business

Planview also integrates resource and capacity planning with financials, replacing the manual reporting and spreadsheet consolidation that many organizations rely on today. Leaders can see whether they have the teams and skills required to fulfill a given investment plan, and if shifting funds between portfolios or value streams would accelerate outcomes or strain capacity. By aligning funding with real delivery capacity, leaders can avoid overcommitted teams and misallocated investment.

Planview tracks budget, forecast, and actuals across the entire strategic portfolio in real time. Dashboards reveal where spend is diverging from plan, which products are delivering value efficiently, and where financial risk is emerging. Instead of waiting for end-of-quarter reporting cycles, executives get early signals that allow timely course correction—reallocating funds, adjusting scope, or reinforcing key areas before issues escalate.

The result is a financial governance model built for modern product organizations: Flexible rather than fixed, evidence-based rather than assumption-driven, and deeply connected to the work teams are doing every day.

The product IT operating model only improves strategy-execution alignment if it is managed by the right metrics. These metrics must provide a line of sight from strategic objectives to product and value stream performance, without overwhelming teams with noise.

Measuring Alignment of Execution to Strategy

Leaders need to know whether day-to-day decisions and workflows are aligned with strategy. Measuring across these five areas can indicate how closely execution is connected:

1. OKR alignment score: Identify the proportion of team-level OKRs that clearly trace back to company objectives. This surfaces where teams have drifted into local optimization.
2. Investment distribution: Compare how capacity is allocated today and what the strategy demands—by segment, journey, value stream, or theme.
3. Roadmap coherence: See the extent to which product roadmaps, viewed together, address strategic gaps rather than creating duplication or fragmentation.
4. Decision velocity: Review how quickly the organization moves from insight or opportunity to funded action. Slow decision cycles are often a sign of misaligned governance.
5. Team confidence: Take regular pulse checks on whether teams understand the strategy and feel they are working on the most important problems.

Business Outcome Measurements

The business outcomes that are measured should reflect the objectives of the overarching strategy. Select metrics that will best represent any progress made toward the strategy. These could include:

• Product-level KPIs: Revenue, cost savings, market share, risk reduction, operational efficiency—selected to reflect the product’s strategic role.
• Customer outcomes: Measures like NPS, CSAT, adoption, engagement, retention, and lifetime value all connect product decisions directly to customer behavior.
• Financial performance: Product P&Ls that combine development, operations, and support costs with attributable revenue or savings.

Operational and Flow Metrics

In the product operating model, operational health and flow metrics guard against unsustainable patterns that undermine long-term value. Measure these safeguards:

• Operational health: Availability, incident rates, security posture, and technical debt trends all indicate whether the product is sustainable and resilient.
• Time-to-value: Cycle time from idea to first value, and from first value to full value (for example, the adoption plateau). Shorter cycles support experimentation and learning.

Continuous Feedback Mechanisms

To promote the continuous improvement that’s essential to the product operating model transformed state, metrics must feed into habits and rituals, not just dashboards. Adopt these patterns of continuous feedback:

• Automated reporting: Reduce manual reporting burdens so teams and leaders can focus on interpretation and action.
• Rhythms of review: Weekly retrospectives, regular product reviews, monthly operational sessions, and quarterly business reviews keep strategy and execution connected.
• Customer feedback loops: Continuous ingestion and response to customer feedback reinforces trust and ensures strategy remains grounded in real needs.
• Experimentation culture: Framing work as hypotheses and learning from both positive and negative results ensures that strategy evolves based on evidence.
• Retrospective learning: Systematically capturing and sharing lessons from successes and failures accelerates organizational learning across teams and value streams.

Make Confident, Data-Backed Decisions With Planview’s Metrics Framework and Analytics Capabilities

Planview’s metrics framework translates the complexity of software delivery into a unified language understood by technical teams, product leaders, and executives alike. Rather than fragmented metrics from individual tools—velocity from Jira, deployment frequency from GitHub, incident rates from monitoring platforms—Planview’s analytics engine ingests data across 60+ tools and normalizes it into Flow Metrics that measure end-to-end value delivery.

The core framework includes:

• Throughput (features completed per cycle)
• Cycle Time (how long from start to finish)
• Lead Time (concept to customer)
• Work in Progress (items in flight)
• Quality metrics (defects, rework rates)

These metrics operate at multiple levels:

• Individual value streams show where bottlenecks exist.
• Portfolio views reveal which product lines are delivering efficiently versus constrained.
• Organizational dashboards demonstrate whether transformation initiatives are achieving promised improvements in speed and cost.

Unlike vanity metrics that reward activity over outcomes—lines of code written, individual utilization percentages—Flow Metrics align incentives with business results.

“Leveraging Flow Metrics has provided us with numerous opportunities for learning and course correction, resulting in improved product outcomes and better market fit.” – Senior Staff Software Engineer, Included Health

Read the full case study here: Achieving Data-driven Visibility: How Flow Metrics Transformed Included Health’s Post-Merger Operations

In the product operating model, teams are measured on delivering value predictably, not on looking busy. This creates fundamentally different behavior. Instead of maximizing resource utilization (which drives queuing and delays), teams optimize for flow (which requires managing work in progress and removing constraints).

Planview Anvi amplifies these analytics capabilities by applying machine learning to detect patterns invisible to human analysis. Rather than requiring analysts to manually inspect dashboards, Anvi automatically identifies bottlenecks, predicts delivery risks before they materialize, and recommends specific interventions with quantified impact. See these example scenarios:

• When cycle time is trending upward, Anvi pinpoints whether the cause is increased complexity, resource constraints, quality issues, or dependency delays—and recommends targeted solutions.
• When one team’s capacity is blocking downstream delivery, Anvi flags the dependency and models reallocation scenarios.
• When rework consumes escalating percentages of capacity, Anvi identifies root causes and suggests prevention mechanisms.

Anvi also democratizes insights through a natural language interface, allowing anyone—from engineering leads to finance executives to board members—to ask questions about delivery performance and receive specific, actionable answers.

These transformed product operating model measurements take analytics from a specialized function requiring data science expertise into an organizational capability accessible to decision-makers at every level. The result is faster, more confident decision-making grounded in data rather than intuition, and continuous optimization of the system that delivers value.

Even well-designed product operating models can drift away from their strategic intent. Recognizing common failure patterns early allows organizations to adjust before misalignment becomes entrenched.

Pitfall 1: Strategy Dilution as It Cascades

A clear strategy at the top can fragment as it moves through layers of the organization. Avoid it by knowing the:

• Warning signs: Teams can’t explain how their work connects to company goals, roadmaps across teams show little thematic coherence, the organization accumulates dozens of competing objectives.
• Root causes: Ambiguous language, too many priorities, inconsistent translation at each level, and a lack of shared artifacts that teams use day-to-day.
• Ways to prevent: Keep top-level objectives few and specific, require each layer to show explicit connections to higher-level goals, maintain living strategy artifacts, and empower teams to challenge misaligned work.

Pitfall 2: Governance Overload

Governance can start as an enabler but morph into an obstacle. Pay attention to how governance looks in the organization:

• The trap: Recreating project-style gatekeeping under new names—excessive reporting, multiple approvals, and rigid ceremonies.
• Symptoms: Product managers spending disproportionate time on status updates, decisions regularly escalated, roadmaps locked in far ahead of learning.
• Right-sizing governance:
  • Differentiate oversight (understanding outcomes) from approval (controlling actions).
  • Establish clear thresholds for when decisions stay with teams versus when they escalate.
  • Use automated dashboards in place of many status meetings.
  • Track governance efficiency explicitly via decision cycle times and administrative load.

Pitfall 3: Losing Sight of Business Outcomes

When implementing and maintaining the product operating model, it’s easy for teams to become enamored with the mechanics of agile delivery and product practice while losing connection to the “so what?” Keep an eye out to maintain alignment:

• Red flags: Teams struggle to articulate business impact, customer or financial metrics remain flat despite heavy delivery, low-adoption features persist.
• Contributing factors: Reward systems focused on volume of delivery, lack of direct exposure to customers, and no clear line from product work to financial or strategic outcomes.
• Course correction: Anchor goals in outcomes, require impact evidence in retrospectives, use feature flagging and experimentation to validate hypotheses, and give teams visibility into P&Ls and key business metrics.

“Planview Portfolios acts as a key integrator, marrying our activities across the board with programs, how the processes are working, and what kind of capabilities our people have to execute.” – Global Business Process Owner of Innovation, Manufacturing Company

Read the full case study here: Manufacturing Company Implements Innovation Strategy and Governance for Improved Product Delivery

In a product operating model, planning shifts from an annual event to a continuous, multi-horizon process. The goal is not to predict the future perfectly, but to keep strategy, capacity, and execution in constant dialogue.

The three frameworks below can be used in tandem to modulate different levels of planning throughout the organization.

Anchoring Strategy and Planning Horizons

Anchoring methodology incorporates objectives, OKRs, and future planning. It creates a planning system that is both stable enough for teams to focus and flexible enough to respond to change. The components are:

• Annual strategic anchoring that defines a small set of company-level objectives and target outcomes that serve as the “north star” for the year.
• Translation layers that then connect these objectives to value streams, product portfolios, and team OKRs, answering “how will we contribute?” at each level.
• Planning horizons (now / next / later) finally gives structure: The current quarter is committed, the next 1-2 quarters are shaped by hypotheses and dependencies, and the longer horizon captures exploration areas.

PI Planning and Adjustment Cycles

Borrowed and adapted from frameworks like the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®), Program Increment planning (PI Planning) offers a useful pattern for coordinating multiple product teams around shared outcomes. It incorporates:

• PI events to create a shared understanding of strategy, dependencies, and intended outcomes for the next 8-12 weeks.
• Planning outputs that include team-level PI objectives, explicit dependency maps, and a collective view of risks and trade-offs.
• Ongoing coordination through lightweight forums (such as scrum-of-scrums or product councils) ensures that as conditions change, teams can adjust their plans while staying aligned to objectives.

With PI planning, the emphasis is on aligning around outcomes and interdependencies, not on freezing scope.

Continuous Adaptation Frameworks

Continuous planning in the product operating model is sustained by feedback loops. The five mechanisms below provide useful structures to adopt:

1. Evidence-based pivots: Teams review metrics and insights frequently and adjust roadmaps within the boundaries set by quarterly OKRs.
2. Hypothesis-driven execution: Work is framed as experiments (for example, “we believe this change will drive X outcome”), shifting the culture from certainty to learning.
3. Feedback velocity: Techniques such as phased rollouts, beta programs, and feature flags shorten the time between action and validated learning.
4. Portfolio rebalancing: Quarterly investment reviews reallocate capacity based on performance data, strategic bets, and emerging opportunities rather than waiting for a new annual cycle.
5. Adaptive governance: Leaders ask “what did we learn?” and “what will we do differently?” instead of enforcing adherence to outdated plans.

Bringing the product operating model to life relies on purposeful strategy-execution alignment. Transformation success is the product of intentional design, disciplined execution, and sustained leadership commitment.

A product centric IT operating model—anchored in value streams, supported by continuous funding and planning, and enabled by integrated technology—gives organizations a structural advantage. They will display:

• Speed as strategy: Tight alignment between strategy and execution allows organizations to deliver, learn, and adapt faster than competitors. Over time, this speed compounds into durable market advantage.
• Resource efficiency: By reducing waste from misaligned work, handoffs, and rework, more of the organization’s investment flows into initiatives that actually move strategic metrics.
• Talent and culture: Teams with clear purpose, autonomy, and ownership are more engaged and more likely to stay. The operating model becomes a differentiator in attracting and retaining top talent.
• Innovation capacity: When strategic intent is clear and governance supports experimentation, organizations can balance sustaining the core with exploring new opportunities.

For leadership, the implications are clear:

• Alignment is a continuous discipline, not a once-a-year exercise.
• Empowerment only works when strategic boundaries are explicit and consistently reinforced.
• Outcomes must take precedence over outputs in both measurement and recognition.
• Transformation requires patience through the messy middle and a willingness to adjust structures, funding, and behaviors as learning emerges.
• Technology is an enabler, but culture and leadership behaviors ultimately determine whether the operating model delivers on its promise.

When organizations commit to this journey, the payoff is more than efficient execution. They gain a way of operating in which strategy, teams, and technology move together. This lays the foundation to combine agentic AI with continuous delivery and human creativity, ultimately creating a sustained competitive edge.

A practical path forward with the product operating model often starts with:

• Assessing how well current work maps to strategy.
• Piloting product-centric funding and governance for a small number of value streams or products.
• Building product management and leadership capability.
• Gradually extending the model as evidence of impact accumulates.

Explore how Planview’s Strategic Portfolio Management and Value Stream Management solutions can help your organization be transformed by moving to the product operating model.