"Instead of Portfolio Management - Just Create Product Teams" - Have you heard that before, Reader?
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While I understand the angst against Portfolio Management Theater as a solution to Agile Theater...
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And while I agree wholeheartedly that the north star is to descale by reorganizing around value
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I find reality a bit more nuanced....
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Most leaders I encounter can't "just create product teams" their way out of decades of complex products and systems.
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None of them are Jeff Bezos - they don't have the mandate or budget to move all the way to an environment where all strategic goals can be achieved solely by empowered product teams working on their own.
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Yes, AI can help some by helping smaller teams tackle a wider breadth of the codebase. They can help by reducing tech debt (or improving automation coverage to make it safer to change things).
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Yes, through proactive investment into platforms and enabling teams, we could minimize the need for managing cross-initiatives.
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However, in most cases, at best, we will flip the product organization to rely much more on empowered teams and reduce the percentage of portfolio-level concerns.
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We won't be able to fully flatten the product organization anytime soon.
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So it might not be popular with the cool agilist crowd, but I do think Lean Portfolio Management has a role.
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It has a role in bringing agile and product operating systems to tackling these strategic cross initiatives.
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In providing intent, context, and guardrails that ENABLE and guide these empowered product teams.
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It provides the surface area for leaders to learn, apply, and lead by example using product, evidence-informed, agile thinking...

And what I'm most excited about these days is how it helps bring agile and product thinking to the broader organization, even beyond the boundaries of the technology/product investments.