This document discusses five key areas that successful product development organizations prioritize for improvement: 1) practitioner enablement to ensure people have the necessary skills and resources, 2) balanced teams with cross-discipline representation, 3) aligned intent between leaders and teams on priorities and goals, 4) evidence-based funding based on validating assumptions with experiments, and 5) being a learning organization that incorporates feedback into decisions. Each area is described across a scale from 1-5, with 1 indicating challenges and 5 indicating the desired state of continuous improvement and success.

1. 1
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Product Development Journey
Health Markers

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Successful product development organizations continuously
deliver value.
Continuous delivery of value becomes challenging when
organizations grow and/or are constrained.
Successful organizations retro & repair, reflecting on
questions like:
What challenges are we experiencing?
What constraints exist?
How might we improve?

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Successful product development organizations prioritize
improvement in five areas:
● Practitioner enablement: People have the tools, skills, information and resources
needed to expeditiously deliver their best
● Balanced teams: We value cross-discipline communication and team
representation to drive speedy decision making, lean solutions, and diversity of
strengths, skills, and perspective.
● Aligned intent: We benefit from total alignment of all layers of the organization
on the results that matter most
● Evidence-based funding of value: We invest in opportunities for value, based on
evidence versus risky assumptions that can create waste
● Learning organization: “Infinite learners” are pervasive throughout the
organization; feedback & evidence drives decisions.

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Practitioner
Enablement
We believe that enabling ourselves to
teach the skills to build modern
software products will result in
sustainably and self-sufficiently scaling
up our teams to meet business
demand.
We will know we have succeeded
when our teams are able to onboard
new colleagues and enable them with
essential skills with minimal disruption
to their current velocity.
1
Enablement: Heavy reliance on external sources of “resources”
Enablement: Provides minimal or no organizationally supported training
Career path: Advancement is limited or ad-hoc
2
Enablement: Practitioners struggle to find time for education or enablement
Enablement: Begins to shift the balance of practitioners from contracted to in-house
Career path: People are rewarded for the hours they put in rather than the outcomes they
help deliver
3
Enablement: Leadership actively manages priorities to allow for enablement of new
capabilities
Enablement: Cross-team rotations are occurring to allow for further enablement
4
Enablement: Core practice talks, experience reports, and tech talks are happening regularly
Career path: Practice leaders are starting to emerge and are being encouraged to grow from
management
5
Career path: Objective criteria (e.g., Capabilities Scorecards) have been created, reviewed
with leadership, and used to shape the career paths of practitioners
Career path: Sharing and teaching are highlighted in senior practitioner career path
Enablement: New hires can become enablement leaders themselves within a reasonable time
frame

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Balanced Teams
We believe that small, cross-
disciplinary, empowered teams with
the skills to iteratively take a product
from concept to production will result
in faster time to market and realization
of business value with less risk.
We will know we have succeeded
when our company can observe a
market condition and react to deliver
business value without dependency
on external resources.
1
Team balance: Organized as, e.g., separate role-based workgroups (development, QA,
operations)
Team balance: Individual “heroics” are recognized and rewarded, formally or informally
Working environment: Can’t get space or equipment; make do with repurposed and
workaround resources
2
Team balance: Developers form the basis of teams, with product management and/or product
design underrepresented; product managers and/or product designers are often stretched
across multiple projects
Team balance: Often groups like security, release management, compliance, data, etc., are not
involved
Team balance: Has identified product managers, product designers, and developers to form a
balanced team
3
Team balance: Dedicated points-of-contact are identified from groups like security, release
management, compliance, data, etc., and actively participate
Working environment: Updated facilities support collocated balanced teams and pairing;
some requests still require senior-level intervention
4 Team balance: Specializations like security, compliance, release management, data become
embedded within portfolios
5
Team balance: Product leaders outside balanced teams understand and provide for the needs
of balanced teams
Working environment: Modern spaces serve full range of teams’ needs; little or no friction to
get needed resources

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Total Aligned
Intent
We believe that alignment between
leaders and our teams will result in
self-organized, empowered teams
capable of acting with autonomy to
deliver business value with minimal
guardrails.
We will know we have succeeded
when product teams prioritize based
on business outcomes and
stakeholders engage via metrics and
learnings rather than status updates.
1
Decentralized decision-making/cascading intent: Hard to see how project roadmaps support
any broader company vision
Decentralized decision-making/cascading intent: Priorities disconnected between leadership
not directly connected to broader vision
Decentralized decision-making/cascading intent: Leaders compete for resources/backlog
priority
2
Decentralized decision-making/cascading intent: Senior leadership articulates a mission and
objectives
Decentralized decision-making/cascading intent: Practitioners struggle to relate what they
are contributing to a mission or vision; leaders are frustrated by perceived “lack of urgency”
3
Decentralized decision-making/cascading intent: Senior leaders communicate north star &
metrics; teams have some limited flexibility to act in that direction
Decentralized decision-making/cascading intent: Portfolio-level objectives are set and can be
tied back to the company mission and objectives
4 Decentralized decision-making/cascading intent: Teams are consistently empowered to
change tactics within product strategy
5
Decentralized decision-making/cascading intent: Incentive structure and goals match north
star and drive aligned action
Decentralized decision-making/cascading intent: ICs can trace the work they are doing back
to the leaders’ intent, metrics, and vision; leaders can map outcomes to product teams
Decentralized decision-making/cascading intent: Teams are consistently empowered to
challenge strategy to achieve desired business outcomes

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Evidence-Based
Funding of Value
We believe that funding work based
on learnings from experiments will
result in better & earlier product
outcomes.
We’ll know we have succeeded when
we are funding work in response to
market changes in real time.
1
Value streams: Software is secondary to the organization’s perceived core business
elsewhere; teams are “order-takers.”
Value streams: IT seen as cost center function focusing on maintenance
ROI: Budgets are for *projects* with relative value
ROI: Budgets require detail on what will be built
ROI: Assumptions going into budget requests are noted, but no work to validate assumptions
2
Value streams: Project stakeholders interact infrequently with software delivery teams (e.g.,
quarterly, but not between)
ROI: Teams see success as executing on requirements, believing business value decisions
have been made elsewhere
ROI: Teams are asked to have metrics in place, and a definition of success (but not regularly
asked to share)
3
Team stability: Durable teams are formed around products vs projects (continuous investment
in value delivery)
Value streams: Software delivery and its funding sponsors are aligned, with coordinated
finances and decision-making
ROI: Teams are empowered to ask for input for business-value-based backlog prioritization
ROI: Teams run experiments to invalidate or validate risky assumptions
ROI: Leaders ask questions about learnings based on evidence from experiments
4
Value streams: Funding sponsors are active participants in well-run, regular lean governance
meetings, where product direction is validated and critical decisions are made
Value streams: Organization is funding valued products, versus disparate projects
ROI: Teams are consistently held accountable for delivering high-value product outcomes (and
learnings that de-risk product are counted, too).
5 ROI: Products and product teams are humming along, delivering continuous value in terms of
learnings to validate problem-solution, product-market or market-scale fit

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Learning
Organization
We believe that constantly
incorporating feedback into
decision-making will result in a culture
of continuous improvement for both
processes and products.
We will know we have succeeded
when our leaders measure success in
terms of outcomes over outputs.
1
User adoption/feedback: Annual surveys done; results eventually make their way to product
teams via next year’s project plans
Leaders willing to change: Internal feedback takes the form of “suggestions” which are rarely,
if ever, acted upon
2
User adoption/feedback: Reactive feedback from users is absorbed by teams after release
and used to influence medium-term iterations of products, typically within a quarter
Leaders willing to change: Seeks to use the perceived success of other companies as a
predefined “handbook” for change
3
User adoption/feedback: User feedback is key component to build, measure, learn cycle to
continually lower risk
Experimentation safety: Conversations around psychological safety occur and Leaders willing
to change: the organization puts structures in place to foster candid input from contributors at
all levels
4
Leaders willing to change: Learns from their own experience and history, learns from
experiences and best practices of others
Leaders willing to change: Org structure changes to support new learnings (HR, Finance)
User adoption/feedback: Both leaders and teams take action to course-correct based on data
5
Leaders willing to change: Adept at translating new knowledge into new ways of behaving
Leaders willing to change: Fundamental shift in the way that business and IT celebrate;
business rallies people across the organization around this new way of working and the vision,
and invites others to participate
Experimentation safety: Individuals feel safe taking risks; “failures” are valued as a means of
purchasing information