Is your operating model holding you back?

Fund Teams not Projects, Outcomes not Features

There’s no shortage of evidence out there about the value of the product model, yet surprisingly (to me anyway), there are many companies still spinning up project funded teams to deliver digital products and solutions. They are locked into annual budgets and fixed scope commitments, optimising for predictable outputs rather than any meaningful outcomes.

They may have big ambitions of growth, and talk the talk of customer-centricity, but their ways of working simply don’t support these ambitions. Often they have gone through an "Agile Transformation" but there is nothing agile about their reality.

Instead, they’re stuck in an old-school project mindset, prioritsing deadlines over outcomes, handoffs over collaboration, and short-term wins over long-term value. 

When projects fail to deliver on a promise made months or years ago, distrust grows and leadership responds with more governance, more command, more control. I'm not being overdramatic when I say that it's heartbreaking.

Here is what happens when organisations work this way:

• Fragmentation – Business and IT operate in silos with IT as a service provider, not partner.
• Lack of End-to-End Ownership – Work is handed off from function to function, with no shared accountability for outcomes.
• Project-Based Thinking – Teams are formed to deliver fixed-scope initiatives, then disbanded, rather than owning long-term value creation.
• Governance Overload – Heavy approval layers slow decision-making and kill agility.
• The Wrong Success Metrics – Shipping features gets celebrated, but actual customer impact? That’s an afterthought.

Teams continue delivering, but the system itself is working against them, making real value realisation impossible.

Shifting away from this old school approach is largely cultural and without exec sponsorship, certainly not easy. It means breaking down silos, realigning incentives, and empowering teams with clear ownership and autonomy.

The Playbook for Change

This isn’t just an IT problem. It’s an organisation problem that requires leaders to step up and lead the change.

1. Organise Around End-to-End Value

Project-centric organisations are built around internal structures, not customer value. The fix? Cross-functional teams that own a domain from strategy to execution.

• Instead of forming teams for a project, fund them persistently so they can iterate and improve continuously.
• Give them clear accountability for business outcomes, not just task completion.
• Shift direction from “here’s a list of features to build” to “here’s a problem to solve” and let the teams figure out how.

Traditional funding models kill momentum. They force teams to fight for budget every cycle, instead of focusing on long-term value creation. Instead, companies should:

• Allocate budgets to value streams or product areas instead of individual projects.
• Measure success by customer and business impact rather than delivery deadlines.
• Give teams the financial autonomy to prioritise what moves the needle

Too many teams build first and ask questions later. We need to flip that.

• Validate customer problems before committing resources.
• Test assumptions early to reduce waste and increase confidence in solutions.
• Treat iteration as the default, not an afterthought.

If success is measured by features shipped, teams will optimize for shipping features. The shift? Track what actually moves the business.

• Instead of measuring “velocity,” track customer adoption and satisfaction.
• Instead of celebrating project completion, track actual impact on business goals.
• Instead of just tracking how fast teams work, track how fast value reaches customers.

Making the shift to product thinking isn’t just about strategy, it’s about execution. To build trust, deliver value faster, and create a scalable model, get the basics right. Having guardrails and measuring delivery performance is not a blocker to agility, they are enablers.

• Ensure teams understand their capacity and plan for discovery, BAU as well as strategic initiatives.
• Estimate effort by using relative sizing, historical data and ongoing refinement.
• Break down the effort and slice work into smaller, valuable increments to enable fast feedback loops and learning.

Teams want to succeed. But they can’t do that if they’re trapped in a system that rewards the wrong things. Genuine agility and cross functional accountability are the keys to outpacing the competition, consistently creating real, tangible value.

So the next time you’re caught in the system, ask: Is there a better way?