Don’t tinker; transform. Gradually.

You’ve tried. Not once, not twice. But the stakeholders still need your product development org to deliver better results.

Perhaps you’ve played a leading part in restructuring the teams or changing team-level project management. Or introducing experiments, feature validation, DevOps. Or changing the leadership paradigm.

Everybody works hard, means well, and uses modern practices. And it’s still not enough. How come? What’s missing?

What you need to upgrade is the system of value delivery. Upgrading it requires making congruent changes to all of its aspects: structure, process, leadership, execution, interactions, tooling, choice-making (mindset), culture.

Not piecemeal adoption of disparate ideas.

The thing is, doing all that takes a lot of hard work by a lot of people — all while they’re also trying to get work done and keep the company in business.

Does this transformation sound daunting?

It should be daunting, if you approach it with the usual thinking about transformations: determine the end-state based on the best the industry has to offer, plan it all out, and flip a switch. The typical transformation, as many companies have learned, is painful, risky, and not always successful.

But upgrading value delivery doesn’t have to be that way.

In 2023-24, I modeled gradual transformation and to capture how to do it safely. My model explains how to simultaneously improve all the above aspects without hurting yourself, such that the result is sustainable and measurably better for the value delivery system and the company.

Want to learn about it? Chapter 1 of my book Deliver Better Results summarizes the key ideas in a 20-minute read. Download a free copy here.