Your teams are brilliant.
They’re solving complex customer problems, building innovative solutions, and creating real value every day. But they’re fighting your organizational structure to do it.
Organizations have invested billions in Agile implementations, scaling frameworks, and DevOps programs, yet talented professionals still spend more time in coordination meetings than creating customer value.
The digital change landscape is littered with initiatives that promise to unleash potential but instead add layers of complexity.
Here’s why: these frameworks optimize team performance within existing organizational constraints. They make project handoffs smoother and sprint planning more efficient, but they can’t eliminate the root cause – temporary team formations that require constant coordination overhead.
A product operating model addresses what most frameworks cannot touch: the organizational structure itself.
Instead of helping teams work better within project-based constraints, a product operating model removes those constraints entirely. Teams become permanent, cross-functional units that own complete customer outcomes rather than temporary groups that execute project requirements.
While frameworks change how teams operate, a product operating model changes how businesses operate.
It changes organizational basics — such as funding decisions, team structures, and success metrics — so your teams get the system they need to truly thrive, not another process to follow.
At Planview, we’ve seen organizations like Vanguard achieve significant results from implementing their product operating model. By transferring from temporary project teams to permanent product teams, they eliminated the structural friction hindering them from achieving their goals.
The result: Vanguard saw five-fold increases in delivery speed while reducing incidents by 75%.
Read on to learn how frameworks fall short, three implementation actions that work (including a real use from Vanguard), and how Planview supports product operating model success.
Read Next: Mastering the Product Operating Model: Core Principles for Leaders
Why a Product Operating Model Addresses the Problems Your Frameworks Can’t Solve Alone
The Real Challenge
Traditional project-based approaches create a critical disconnect between strategic intention and execution reality. Strategic objectives get diluted through project approval cycles, annual budgets constrain market responsiveness, and teams optimize for project completion rather than customer impact.
Market opportunities slip away during lengthy approval processes while talented professionals spend more time coordinating handoffs than creating value.
Why Other Approaches Fall Short
Many organizations have tried scaling Agile or implementing DevOps, achieving team-level improvements while enterprise-level problems persist. These frameworks address symptoms — coordination challenges, visibility gaps, alignment issues — typically without changing the underlying structures that create those symptoms.
Here’s the root cause: temporary project teams require constant reformation, knowledge transfer, and coordination overhead. Every project restart means rebuilding team dynamics, reestablishing working relationships, and losing institutional memory. This structural friction creates the very problems that other frameworks try to solve downstream.
The Product Operating Model’s Structural Approach
Instead of optimizing within broken constraints, a product operating model eliminates the constraints by changing four critical elements simultaneously:
- Funding shifts from temporary project budgets to persistent team capacity
- Organization moves from temporary project formations to permanent product teams
- Measurement changes from output tracking (features delivered) to outcome achievement (customer value created)
- Governance aligns with business results rather than project milestones
The Key Takeaway: Teams that persist beyond project boundaries eliminate setup overhead, preserve institutional knowledge, and enable continuous improvement cycles that deliver faster results with higher quality.
Your existing methodologies become more effective because teams can focus on customer value instead of project coordination.
3 Implementation Actions That Work
We talk with business and technology leaders every day. One of the most common questions we hear is: “How do I get started with a product operating model in my organization?” These are the actions we recommend most.
Start with Strategic Alignment
Create direct connections between executive vision and daily team activities. Replace project-based planning cycles with continuous strategy translation that allows teams to adjust direction based on market feedback. Vanguard demonstrated this by connecting modernization goals directly to measurable investor outcomes.
Sustainable change typically requires 18-36 months, allowing for organizational learning and capability development while maintaining business continuity.
Form and Fund Persistent Teams
Establish cross-functional teams that own complete customer journeys rather than functional silos. These persistent teams eliminate departmental handoffs, reduce coordination overhead, and accelerate decision-making. Fund team capacity continuously rather than funding discrete projects with artificial start and stop dates.
Measure Business Outcomes
Shift success metrics from project completion rates to business impact indicators. Track customer value delivery, market responsiveness, and organizational adaptability rather than feature velocity or budget adherence. Establish systematic learning cycles that enable data-driven improvement across all teams.
Vanguard’s Proof Point: Addressing the System
In 2020, Vanguard launched an ambitious five-year digital modernization initiative to transform how they delivered technology solutions to their customers. The investment management giant recognized that their traditional project-based approach was creating inefficiencies and limiting their ability to respond quickly to customer needs.
Key Changes
- Product Teams: Replaced temporary project teams with permanent product teams to retain expertise and reduce overhead
- Cloud & Microservices: Migrated to public cloud and microservice architecture for faster, more stable deployments
- True Agile: Reinforced Agile practices with robust CI/CD pipelines and comprehensive training
- Developer Empowerment: Gave teams direct access to infrastructure and tools to accelerate feature delivery
The results were impressive: Vanguard achieved a five-fold increase in their technology change rate while simultaneously reducing major incidents by 75%. This successful balance of speed and stability translated directly into improved customer satisfaction, as the enhanced agility enabled the company to implement customer experience improvements more quickly and effectively.
The transformation demonstrates how a well-established company can successfully evolve to a sustainable product-focused operating model that better serves customer outcomes.
Read Next: Scaling Flow at Vanguard: A Journey from Pilot to Enterprise Transformation
Planview Enables Product Operating Model Success
Planview has a 40-year history of providing industry-recognized solutions and services to our customers. Business and technology leaders seeking to implement and sustain a product operating model can leverage our AI-powered platform to:
- connect strategy to execution, enabling better alignment, fostering agility at scale, and accelerating innovation
- replace project funding with persistent teams that improve employee engagement through stable, purpose-driven work
- create tighter customer feedback loops for better outcomes while improving financial governance through outcome-based funding decisions.
Your Structure Defines Your Future
The change you need has already begun. Market forces are pushing every organization toward greater adaptability. The companies that thrive will be those that embrace this shift deliberately rather than resist it until circumstances force their hand.
Start small. Prove value. Scale systematically. Each successful implementation builds momentum for the next. Which team will demonstrate what becomes possible when structure serves talent instead of constraining it?
Go Deeper
- See how Planview Copilot can help you drive confident, smarter, faster strategic decisions with data. Watch the Planview Copilot demo.
- Build an organization that responds quickly to change and consistently delivers meaningful results to customers. Get the guide “Creating an Outcome-Based Enterprise: Drive strategic results with the product operating model.”
