Ever feel like your product organization is stuck in the mud? You’re not alone. Many teams start strong, laser-focused on delivering value and achieving product-market fit. But as success scales, things get messy. Dependencies pile up, alignment fades, and suddenly, you’re running a feature factory instead of an empowered product organization.
Why Do Product Organizations Stall?
Here’s the typical lifecycle:
- Early Days: One team, minimal dependencies, clear goals. It’s all about finding product-market fit and delivering value fast.
- Growth Phase: Demand grows, teams specialize, and suddenly alignment becomes a challenge. Conversations shift from outcomes to scope and timelines.
- Scaling Chaos: Multiple products and cross-company initiatives create sprawling dependencies. Work devolves into projects managed with traditional methods (even if they’re disguised as “Agile”).
The result? Fewer empowered teams, more inefficiencies, and a lot of frustration.
Think about it like an upside-down pyramid—where most of the work is tangled and component-oriented, teams that can deliver features on their own are in the top 10%, and a team that owns a product/outcome and can run fast feedback loops, trying different features to move the needle on a metric that matters is a unicorn.
Flipping the Pyramid
You can think about the Agile Product Operating Model as a way to flip this pyramid.
To restructure the product organization and its operating model to push as much work down to the healthier base of the pyramid:
- Empowered Product Teams: The foundation of a healthy organization. These teams own outcomes aligned with strategic goals and operate autonomously. We want to move as much work as possible into such teams. This might require changing product topology, team structure, product architecture, identifying platforms / enabling teams that reduce the context and breadth needed to deliver product outcomes.
- Product Groups: For work that spans multiple teams but can still be managed within a focused group. Use when you can’t create an empowered product team, or it doesn’t make sense yet. Or when you want to encourage synergies across a set of products.
- Strategic Initiatives: A small set of cross-organizational efforts managed with flow principles—focused on outcomes, evidence-driven, and limited in scope to avoid chaos. Once you limit your focus, you can apply product thinking at this level, to maximize the outcomes of these strategic initiatives.
(Does this flipping the pyramid sound familiar? It’s inspired by the Test Automation Pyramid, which is a key framework in the Agile Testing world.)
NOTE: I got the idea for this article and especially the visual above based on a conversation with John Cutler and his article on Work Shape Mix. Go read it now. It’s a gem.
The Roadmap to Change
This isn’t an overnight fix. Transforming into a healthy product organization requires:
- Aligning on strategic goals and priorities.
- Actively limiting the amount of work that is pulled into the higher levels of the Pyramid.
- Using the healthy pyramid as a north star for architectural changes that help detangle products. (Melt the iron spaghetti…)
- Building platforms and enabling teams to support empowered teams.
- Carefully managing the balance between team autonomy and organizational alignment.
- Applying product thinking even to large-scale initiatives—closing feedback loops faster and steering with evidence.
(This trail map is based on the Portfolio Agility Trail Map – a guide for applying an Agile Product Operating Model at scale)
Why It Matters
A flipped pyramid means less micromanagement, more innovation, and a clearer path to delivering real value, not just features or timelines. It’s about creating an environment where empowered teams thrive and your organization can scale without losing its soul.
Curious about how to flip your Product Pyramid? Let’s figure out your Product Operating Model Strategy—together.
This article was originally published on the Scaling w/ Agility Newsletter - subscribe now for more nuanced insights on improving your agility at scale.