Hi there. I thought I'd share what is going on behind the scenes ...

January started with a flurry of deep work with clients and I'm still trying to figure out how to weave writing on a consistent schedule into these periods. In the future I might use these opportunities to share some classics/reruns.

In addition, I've been focused on developing an email course. It's about how to improve organizational traction and outcomes using familiar agility principles and techniques.

I've been working hard on the language around it. For example - it started as Portfolio Agility Roadmap and is evolving into Mastering Organizational Traction. (Yes, you can go on the waiting list for either/both already - that might give me some useful feedback/validation/invalidation...)

Why Portfolio Agility?

Through my work helping scaleup / midsized organizations I've seen some repeating patterns:

1. They grow to a scale that requires multiple teams - and the span of control and involvement grows to the point where leadership either becomes a decision-making bottleneck or feels they have to relinquish control.
2. They extend the product line - and now have multiple products that each have their own goals, customers, priorities - but often depend on some shared resources, or require collaboration across products to deliver synergies.
3. Growth and business dynamics bring about the need for transformation (e.g. moving to a different marketing/sales motion, adopting GenAI, moving to SaaS). These are often complex and require collaboration across functions, on top of other work.

As the organization scales, whatever operating system/model it is using (whether they're actually considering it an operating system or not), isn’t up to speed anymore....

In my work with larger enterprises that understand they're managing a portfolio of products, I've seen how an agile, product-oriented portfolio operating model can help tackle strategic cross-product initiatives more effectively.

I've also seen how this model can be used to tackle business initiatives that go beyond the product organization, with the same agility and product orientation leading to improved traction and outcomes.

Why NOT Portfolio Agility?

Because of reactions such as “We don’t need a Portfolio level perspective. We don’t have a Portfolio.”

My (hot) take is that even a relatively small scale-up company has a portfolio even if they don't call it that.

However, I decided to focus on the problems and desired outcomes, even if the approach we eventually use to address them takes inspiration from portfolio practices.

Of course, some people WANT portfolio management and are looking for a LEANER approach (compared to SAFe, let's say). Can this email course be helpful to these two audiences? Does it make sense to niche down? These are the sorts of questions I'm grappling with.

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Stay Tuned

I'm using any spare cycles I have to solidify the email course and launch it. I believe the right set of language and practices here can really make a difference and address some gaps I see in existing approaches.

It does mean I won't be publishing new insights here as often as I have been. But if you have questions or topics you want my take on - let me know (by replying) and I promise to weigh in.

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Yours,

Yuval "Trying to Focus" Yeret