Today I’d like to share a specific example of a time I had to embrace the kind of portfolio-level thinking I referenced in my video a couple of days ago.
This was the scenario…
My team was responsible for a … we’ll call it “mature” product line. It wasn’t built on the latest flashy technology stack. We weren’t solving big, new, tricky problems or chasing high-stakes product markets. We certainly weren’t idle; our customers always had new ideas for us – ways we could make some incremental improvements in speed or convenience.
Over time, our team began to shrink.
A manager with a single-team perspective would look at the situation and conclude that it was crucial to backfill the positions of those who had departed. Without those backfills, those who remained would have to do more work.
But that was not the conclusion that we reached with a portfolio-level perspective. Looking at the broader engineering department revealed that there were other teams with backlogs whose work would produce more new revenue and solve more valuable problems than the minor and incremental improvements that characterized my team’s backlog.
On my team, yes, fewer people became responsible for a wider swath of our product line. From one standpoint, we each scaled up in terms of the scope of our responsibilities. At the same time, from a metrics standpoint, we measured as less productive than we were before, because we would deliver fewer features while other growing teams delivered more.
It didn’t feel great to lead the shrinking team, but it was exactly what needed to happen for the collective success of the whole department.
If you’d like a thinking partner to explore your current situation with you from a portfolio perspective, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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