Shifting from projects to products: Insights from our open forum
In our recent Project to Product Open Forum, we gathered leaders, practitioners, and transformation experts to explore the challenges and opportunities of moving from a project-centric to a product-centric way of working. The conversation couldn’t have been more timely; with only 2% of organizations fully mature in these transformation attempts and with a failure rate of 70% for business transformations, the shift is proving to be more difficult than anticipated for many organizations.
We began the forum by introducing some of the key barriers that organizations encounter when attempting to make the transition as highlighted in the Project to Product State of Industry Report 2023 by PlanView. We then invited participants to join breakout discussions where they could discuss and share their experiences and ideas. Several recurring themes emerged:
The Project Funding Trap: One of the most significant barriers to a successful project-to-product shift is the traditional annual budgeting cycle, which locks teams into rigid, top-down, project-based funding. This model leads to unrealistic delivery expectations and large batches of work that teams need help managing. The feedback from participants was clear: continuously funded build-and-run teams, supported by Flow Metrics, can eliminate much of the waste intrinsic to project-based funding models.
Breaking Dependency Bottlenecks: While teams can often excel at delivering small units of work, the release process frequently becomes a bottleneck. Dependencies between teams, especially when multiple teams work on the same product, slow down delivery and prevent organizations from achieving the fast flow that product-centric models promise. One attendee noted, "Even though our development velocity is high, we're still slow to release because of all the coordination required at the end." The forum highlighted the importance of independent, self-service capabilities within teams to accelerate flow.
Fostering Rapid Customer Feedback: Another recurring topic was the struggle to integrate customer feedback into product development. Despite the technical ability to release more frequently, many organizations experience long feedback loops—sometimes stretching as long as two months, often due to internal silos or legacy systems that prevent fast iteration. Organizations that successfully reduce this cycle time have established effective feedback channels across their teams.
Building Strong Product Management: A mature product management function emerged as a critical factor for success. Forum participants stressed the need for a clear product vision, roadmap, and governance structure that ensures the right balance of feature work, defect fixing, risk mitigation, and technical debt reduction. Product teams that don’t have this balance often become feature factories, neglecting the work needed to sustain their products in the long term.
The Role of Organizational Dynamics: One of the most compelling insights from the forum was the acknowledgement that technical and process improvements alone are not enough. Organizational dynamics, such as how teams are structured, how leadership engages with them, and how cross-functional collaboration is fostered, play a significant role in determining success. Participants emphasised the need to create a socio-technical system that enables psychological safety, trust, and empowerment, allowing teams to adapt and evolve as customer needs change.
Key Takeaways
Continuous Funding over Project-Based Funding: Shifting from a project-centric to a product-centric approach requires a fundamental change in how teams are funded. Organizations must move away from annual project cycles to continuously funded, build-and-run teams that are empowered to adapt and improve continuously based on real-time feedback.
Independent, Self-Service Capabilities: To achieve fast flow, teams need the autonomy to release their work independently, without bottlenecks caused by cross-team dependencies. This requires both architectural changes (to reduce technical dependencies) and organizational changes (to break down silos).
Flow Metrics Are Critical But Hard To Measure: Measuring and optimizing for Flow Metrics, such as Flow Velocity, Flow Efficiency, and Flow Time, can provide teams and leaders with the visibility needed to make data-driven decisions. However, many organizations still struggle to incorporate these metrics into their operational reviews.
Rapid Customer Feedback: Incorporating customer feedback into the product development process is essential to success. To achieve this, organizations must focus on shortening the feedback loop by breaking down internal silos and optimizing their value streams for responsiveness.
Empowered Product Management: Product management must move beyond just delivering features. Teams must invest in foundational work, fixing defects, reducing technical debt, and managing risks to ensure long-term product viability. Successful organizations have mature product management functions that govern the product vision and align it with business outcomes.
Embrace Socio-Technical Systems: The shift from projects to products isn’t just about process; it’s about creating an environment that fosters continuous improvement and change. This requires addressing the entire socio-technical system, people, tasks, structure, and technology and ensuring that teams are empowered to respond quickly and effectively.
We enjoyed running this open forum, which provided invaluable insights and reaffirmed the importance of creating an environment where change can emerge organically. As organizations continue their journey from project to product, it is critical to focus on building the systems, structures, and cultures that support this transformation.
About the author:
Rich Allen is a Team Topologies Valued Practicioner and he has been developing software and helping organisations implement lean and agile ways of working for over two decades. Specializing in the application of Continuous Improvement practices he helps businesses to uncover bottlenecks, highlight opportunities to optimise for flow and introduce ways of encouraging feedback in a culture of continuous learning.
Rich is also co-founder of the Developer South Coast technology user group in the UK which has been helping developers discover and learn about new technologies for over thirteen years.
