If you want to understand why even the strongest technology organizations continue to miss targets, you have to step into the chair of a technology leader. The pace is unrelenting. Customer expectations accelerate faster than your capacity. The need for transformation never ends. And every quarter, you’re expected to deliver more, faster, and with less risk and greater clarity.
This was the landscape Philip Betts, GVP of Product Development at Planview, stepped into when he joined the organization. In the recent webinar, “From Chaos to Cohesion: A GVP’s Guide to Transforming Product Development,” Philip walked through how he reshaped a globally distributed engineering organization by grounding every decision in visibility, alignment, and focus on value.
His experience illustrates why technology leaders miss targets—not because teams lack talent, but because they lack the connected systems, actionable intelligence, and organizational clarity required to deliver predictably at scale. It also shows what it takes to change that trajectory by putting the right solutions, insights, and systems in place to drive consistent, predictable software delivery.
The Problem Every Leader Knows Too Well
Before transformation, Planview’s product development environment resembled what many enterprises quietly battle:
- Distributed global teams working across different time zones, tools, and expectations
- Deep knowledge silos rooted in tenure and legacy systems
- Massive variability in how teams planned, built, tested, and released
- Difficulty aligning strategy to execution
- Mounting technical debt slowing innovation
- Pressure from the business for faster delivery with fewer surprises
Philip described an organization rich in talent but constrained by fragmentation. People were working hard, but not always on the right things. Teams were sprinting, but rarely synchronizing. Leadership had goals, but not always data.
“This was a high-performing group,” Philip said in the webinar, “but we didn’t have a unified way to see where bottlenecks were forming or why delivery timelines were slipping.”
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Most technology leaders live with this friction on a daily basis. The challenge isn’t knowing what’s wrong. It’s knowing where to start—and how to create alignment across dozens of teams and thousands of work items.
The Turning Point: When Visibility Becomes a Strategy
Philip’s first move wasn’t to restructure or overhaul. It was to create the visibility needed to understand the real problem.
He introduced Planview Viz across the organization as a single source of truth for how work really flowed through the system. Enhanced by Planview Anvi, leaders gained something even more powerful: AI-driven insights that instantly highlighted bottlenecks, emerging risks, and delivery trends long before they escalated.
Suddenly, the fog lifted.
For the first time, leadership gained real-time visibility, within minutes, into:
- Where work stalled
- How much WIP was constraining throughput
- Which teams were overloaded
- How long value took to reach customers
- Where technical debt was silently draining velocity
- How delivery patterns varied across geographic regions
- Which emerging risks needed prioritization and why
Suddenly, teams had clarity instead of confusion. Leaders had truth instead of assumptions. Every discussion shifted from “what we think” to “what we know.”
“We finally had a way to talk about delivery grounded in reality,” Philip explained. “You can’t fix what you can’t see—and Planview Viz lets us see everything.”
For leaders accustomed to dashboards that cloud the truth, this marks a pivotal shift—a move from guesswork to evidence-backed, intelligently guided decision-making.
Aligning Strategy to Execution with OKRs, Roadmaps, and AI
Once visibility improved, the next bottleneck surfaced: misalignment.
Teams were shipping features, but were they delivering outcomes? Engineering was sprinting, but was it sprinting in the right direction? And how could teams tie tactical work to strategic objectives across a global enterprise?
Philip introduced a simple yet powerful solution: OKRs paired with Planview Roadmaps and Portfolios, enhanced by Anvi’s generative AI capabilities.
With this combination, leaders could:
- Translate strategic priorities into measurable, trackable targets
- Map every initiative back to outcomes, not just output
- See the entire cross-team delivery landscape
- Allocate capacity based on strategy, not noise
- Empower teams with clear goals and autonomy
- Surface misaligned work, hidden risks, and opportunities to accelerate delivery
OKRs stitched strategy to execution and anchored priorities. Roadmaps became real-time guides for decision-making. And Portfolios became the operating system for planning, forecast accuracy, and dependency awareness.
What followed was a shift from scattered motion to coordinated progress—teams driving meaningful outcomes and leaders benefiting from intelligent foresight they could depend on.
Breaking Silos Through Connected Toolchains
Once strategy and visibility were finally connected, a deeper challenge surfaced—one that consistently challenges even the most seasoned technology leaders. Even with shared priorities and outcome-driven alignment, the day-to-day execution remained fragmented across an increasingly complex DevOps toolchain. Planning lived in one system. Development in another. And QA, security, support, and release automation each operated in their own disconnected environments.
In other words, the organization had strategic clarity, but its operational data was still scattered, making it nearly impossible to view work as a single, end-to-end flow.
This is where Planview Hub became essential. Hub serves as the connective layer across the entire delivery ecosystem, integrating tools, synchronizing data, and ensuring that information moves seamlessly throughout the value stream. Philip leveraged Hub to transform what had been a patchwork of isolated systems into a unified, intelligent foundation for flow.
Hub allowed Philip’s teams to:
- Integrate heterogeneous tools instantly
- Remove manual status reporting
- Create end-to-end traceability
- Feed Viz with real-time, reliable data
- Reduce inconsistencies between systems
- Break down historical silos between development, QA, and support
- Detect anomalies and recommend corrective actions across the connected toolchain
For the first time, work flowed through the organization as a single, connected system, rather than a collection of disconnected handoffs. The insights leadership gained from Viz and Roadmaps were now backed by accurate, real-time data from the teams doing the work, enabling decisions based on facts—not assumptions.
The result was a delivery environment where alignment existed not just on paper. It was supported and reinforced through every stage of execution, from strategy to release.
Cultural Transformation Empowered by AI
One of the clearest messages from the webinar was this: while technology doesn’t create transformation on its own, it makes meaningful transformation achievable. With unified visibility from Viz, alignment driven by OKRs and Roadmaps, and a connected toolchain powered by Hub, Philip built the conditions for a healthier, higher-performing culture to emerge.
The organization began shifting toward a way of working defined by:
- Continuous improvement
- Transparent decision-making
- Psychological safety
- Predictable delivery
- Ownership and accountability
- A willingness to experiment and learn
- A shared reliance on accurate, end-to-end data
As information became more reliable and easier to access, teams stopped hiding problems and started surfacing them early. Delivery became more predictable because dependencies were no longer invisible. Innovation strengthened because teams weren’t fighting through noise, conflicting data, or unnecessary manual reporting.
When clarity and shared purpose take hold, they begin to guide every decision and every team. This shift creates an environment where people understand not just what they’re delivering, but why it matters—and how their work contributes to the organization’s broader outcomes.
With this cultural foundation in place, the impact of Planview’s technology became even more pronounced. Leaders gained the confidence to make faster, smarter decisions. Delivery risk decreased because blind spots disappeared. And teams were able to focus on meaningful work instead of navigating operational friction.
The result was a more resilient, aligned, and high-performing organization—one capable of sustaining momentum and accelerating growth long into the future.
The Executive Imperative: Don’t Lead in the Dark
If you lead engineering, product, delivery, or transformation, your biggest challenge isn’t that your teams can’t deliver. It’s that your ecosystem is too complex to manage without integrated visibility, alignment, and flow intelligence—especially now that AI is raising the bar for operational excellence across every industry.
And the stakes have never been higher. Board expectations are increasing. Talent is distributed. Toolchains are sprawling. Customers expect constant improvement. In this environment, leaders can no longer rely on intuition, fragmented data, or isolated team-level success. They need systems that expose reality, connect strategy to execution, and highlight risks before they become delays.
Philip’s story is a blueprint—one told not from a consultant’s perspective, but from a technology leader who sat in the chaos and built the system that replaced it. His transformation shows that predictability isn’t an aspirational state; it’s an achievable one when the right foundation is in place.
Philip’s message to fellow executives is simple:
“Transformation isn’t a moment. It’s a discipline. And the right tools make that discipline sustainable.”
This experience underscores a reality every technology leader must confront: sustainable transformation isn’t achieved through effort alone. It requires the right systems, the right visibility, and the right foundation to lead with confidence.
To see how these elements came together within Planview’s own product development organization, watch the webinar to hear Philip Betts walk through the transformation firsthand and explore the practices, insights, and tools that enabled predictable, high-velocity delivery at scale.
