Our friends at Silicon Valley Product Group are masters of painting the vision. It only takes one meeting with Christian Idiodi to light a fire under executive teams, challenge the status quo, and inspire organisations to rethink how they work. The message is clear: if you want to deliver real value, empower your teams with problems to solve and focus on outcomes.
It’s compelling. And it’s right.
But here’s the thing most leaders underestimate:
Deciding to change is the easy part.
In many organisations, the decision gets made. There’s alignment at the top. A vision is set. Leadership announces: “We’re going to work this new way. Empowered teams. Customer-centricity. Experimentation. Outcome focus. Let’s go.”
If only it were that simple...
In theory, it sounds like flipping a switch.
But in practice? You’re trying to reinvent how value flows through a company that was built for something else.
In one large business we worked with, teams were excited to adopt a new way of working. But the starting point was this: teams were assigned projects, quality issues clogged every release, and customer insight barely made it to the delivery backlog.
In another case, leaders declared a shift to outcome focus, but funding still flowed through project gates. Teams were temporary. Discovery wasn’t supported. Strategy sat in PowerPoint decks, disconnected from roadmaps. Product owners were buried in Jira tickets and release planning, with little time or capability to talk to customers.
Elsewhere, a business facing industry headwinds knew it needed to simplify and scale. But decades of tech debt, a trunk-and-branch code base, and bespoke client delivery made agility impossible. They didn’t just lack cross-functional teams, they lacked shared goals, shared governance, and a shared understanding of what needed to change.
These aren’t edge cases. This is the pattern.
If you want to shift from project-based, output-driven delivery to a model that delivers sustainable value, here’s what you really need to change:
Declaring a vision isn’t enough. Teams need to see how their work links to company goals. They need outcome roadmaps that prioritise problems to solve, not lists of features to ship.
Articulate a compelling strategy. Build outcome-focused roadmaps. Connect the dots all the way to team backlogs.
If funding is tied to fixed scope and time-bound projects, teams are not empowered, no matter what you tell them. Value doesn’t flow in quarterly bursts; it’s continuous. So your funding must be too.
Shift to persistent funding of cross-functional teams aligned to value streams.
Most orgs are still structured around tech stacks, internal capabilities, or business functions. That creates handoffs, delays, and a lack of ownership. Real change means designing teams that own outcomes end-to-end.
Map your value streams. Redesign team topology to reduce dependencies and align with outcomes.
You can’t just tell teams they’re empowered and walk away. Empowerment comes from clear roles, access to data and customers, psychological safety, and the right support systems.
Coach teams in discovery. Embed design and research. Give space for teams to explore and learn.
Teams can’t ship quickly or safely if they’re battling broken environments, brittle tests, or manual releases. In several organizations we worked with, CI/CD was a concept — but not a reality. That’s a major blocker.
Prioritise engineering enablement. Build in automated testing, modern pipelines, and environments that support continuous delivery.
In one company, there were no true product managers — just people called product managers. The result? No discovery. No strategic thinking. Just delivery. Capability uplift isn’t just about training; it’s about reshaping roles and expectations.
Define what good looks like. Invest in role clarity, mentoring, and structured capability uplift across product, design, and engineering.
Many organisations talk about becoming more adaptive, customer-focused, and outcome-driven. They make the decision. They share the vision.
But the vision won’t deliver itself.
Changing how you choose problems, how you fund work, how you organise teams, how you measure success, how you release, and how you learn, that’s the real work. That’s the transformation.
And it doesn’t happen overnight.
It happens one team, one value stream, one system at a time and takes courage, consistency, and commitment.