Do You Need to Deliver More, Faster?

Do your roadmaps and project portfolios always contain more work than your teams can deliver in the allotted time?

Hopefully, you can reduce scope to match capacity. Otherwise, you need to increase throughput.

But how? What would you change?

The most straightforward changes are technical: use AI and automation across the lifecycle; improve the delivery pipeline; protect maker time by cutting meetings and distractions.
Other well-known moves are harder to implement: increase psychological safety and empowerment; address tech debt; restructure teams.
There are lesser-known but powerful approaches: apply the Theory of Constraints; reduce WIP and manage flow; create pull systems; eliminate waste.

All of these help you deliver more stuff. They “optimize the machine.”

That’s useful to the extent “the machine” makes a product that delivers the right outcomes (and delivers few wrong ones).

But if that’s not the case, the real question isn’t “How do we do more?”.

It is: How do we do more of the right work?

That requires shifting your focus — from development alone to the whole value delivery system. And it calls for different kinds of changes:

Think in outcomes, not features, everywhere: roadmap, releases, OKRs, sprints, stories
Align on shared priorities
Collaborate more within teams, between teams, and across functions (e.g., use triads)
Engage more closely with users
Create feedback loops around value, not just spec compliance
Make smaller decisions more often, using real data (rather than conjecture, HiPPO, or AI)
Keep backlogs short
Involve developers in deciding what to build, not just how
Defer decisions until the last responsible moment

Remember Agile? These are many of its principles. Agile was always meant to be a strategy for doing more of the right and less of the wrong, not just a process for moving Jira tickets.

These changes are harder to make, because they require upgrades to the cultural foundation. But they are a lot more effective than merely increasing delivery.