Category: Portfolio Management

Building on Quicksand: When Tech Chaos Stalls Innovation

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Editor’s Note: You’re facing unprecedented business challenges. You need more than theories—you need a blueprint. Welcome to a Leader’s Blueprint, your weekly guide to proven strategies that get results.

You have brilliant engineering teams and a clear business strategy. Yet, delivering a seamless customer experience feels like an uphill battle. When you look under the hood of your organization, you don’t see a unified engine; you see a collection of spare parts held together by duct tape. Data exists in silos that don’t talk to each other. Every new feature requires navigating a minefield of fragile legacy code. Your teams want to innovate, but they spend half their sprints fixing what broke yesterday or reinventing the wheel because they didn’t know another team had already built it.

The Hidden Costs of Architectural Inconsistency

When technology choices are disconnected from business strategy, you accrue more than just frustration—you accrue a massive liability.

  • Innovation Stagnation: Instead of creating new value, your most expensive talent is stuck “keeping the lights on,” battling complexity and maintaining redundant systems.
  • Erosion of Trust: When the back-end is chaotic, the front-end user experience suffers. Inconsistent design and system failures tell your customers that you don’t have your house in order.
  • Compounding Technical Debt: Every duplicated effort and quick fix is a loan taken out against your future speed and efficiency.

A Glimpse of the Solution: Enabling Agility

The answer isn’t to return to the days of rigid, top-down architectural control. The solution is Enabling Agility with Enterprise Architecture. This SAFe® competency shifts the Enterprise Architect (EA) into a strategic servant leader who actively champions collaboration and drives innovation across the enterprise.

Effective EAs provide strategic technical guardrails. These are minimum constraints that ensure consistency and compliance while giving Agile Teams the freedom to innovate within those bounds. It aligns technology investment with business goals, ensuring that the “architectural runway” is being paved before the teams need to land their heavy features. It turns architecture into a continuous flow of value, rather than a static document.

Your First Step

Host a short, dedicated one hour forum with a focused group of Enterprise, Solution, and System Architects. The purpose is not to review failures, but to celebrate and share what’s working well. Ask this single question:

“To accelerate our entire portfolio’s flow of value, what is one successful architectural pattern, standard, or technical principle from your value stream that we can share and align on as a consistent standard for everyone to reuse next week?”

This question achieves the following:
Focuses on Value: It ties the architectural discussion directly to accelerating the flow of value.
Highlights Success: It asks for a successful pattern, reinforcing a culture of positive sharing and learning, rather than only problem-finding.
Promotes Reuse: It immediately pushes for consistency and interoperability by encouraging component reuse.

Unlock the Full Blueprint

Moving from technical chaos to a streamlined Architectural Runway requires a shift in practices and mindset. The Enabling Agility with Enterprise Architecture competency provides the tools to establish technical guardrails, evolve the EA role, and align technology with value streams.

Stop letting technical debt dictate your roadmap.

Unlock the full SAFe Framework to build an architecture that adapts as fast as your market does. Get complete access by purchasing your SAFe® Insider membership today.

Get Started

In this Series:

  • Catch up on last week’s post: Lean-Agile Procurement
  • Coming up next: Enabling Agility with Enterprise Architecture from a Technology Leader’s viewpoint

¹ Stripe, “The Developer Coefficient,” September 2018, accessed December 8, 2025, https://stripe.com/files/reports/the-developer-coefficient.pdf

Escaping the Urgent: Why Immediate Demands Are Killing Your Future Growth

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Editor’s Note: You’re facing unprecedented business challenges. You need more than theories—you need a blueprint. Welcome to a Leader’s Blueprint, your weekly guide to proven strategies that get results.

You start every quarter with a bold intention: this is the quarter we finally make traction on our future-proofing initiatives. You have a list of strategic bets that will open new markets and secure the company’s longevity. But then Monday morning hits. A legacy server goes down. A key client requires an immediate bespoke feature update. The sales team needs support to close the quarter. Slowly but surely, the “tyranny of the urgent” takes over. By the time the quarter ends, your team is exhausted from keeping the lights on, and those critical strategic bets haven’t moved an inch. You are surviving today, but you are mortgaging tomorrow.

The Hidden Costs of an Unbalanced Portfolio

When your portfolio is heavily weighted toward immediate demands at the expense of long-term strategy, you aren’t just delaying innovation; you are actively degrading your competitive advantage.

  • Innovation Starvation: While you pour resources into maintaining the status quo, your competitors are building the disruption that will make your core business obsolete.
  • Legacy Anchors: Without a strategy for “Horizon 0” (retiring systems), you continue to fund low-value work and legacy debt, draining the budget needed for growth.
  • Economic Sub-Optimization: By saying “yes” to every urgent request, you dilute your focus. You end up with a traffic jam of good ideas, but very few great outcomes actually getting delivered to the market.

A Glimpse of the Solution

The answer isn’t just “working harder”—it is implementing the Managing a Balanced Portfolio competency. This component of Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) moves you away from reacting to fire drills and toward intentional Horizon Planning. By visualizing your work through a Portfolio Kanban, you can actively manage the flow of value across different horizons:

  • Horizon 1: Extending your core business.
  • Horizon 2: Growing emerging value.
  • Horizon 3: Placing future bets.
  • Horizon 0: Retiring what no longer serves you. This framework empowers Portfolio Leaders to make data-driven “Go/No-Go” decisions, ensuring you are allocating capacity to the future, not just the present.

Your First Step

You can do a quick assessment of your portfolio’s health this week. Review the last 10 significant initiatives or Epics where your portfolio has made significant progress in delivering. 

If 90% or more of your investment is sitting in Horizon 1 (Core), your portfolio may not be balanced for the future. 

You are optimizing for safety today at the risk of irrelevance tomorrow.

Unlock the Full Blueprint

Recognizing the imbalance is the start; fixing it requires a systemic approach. The Managing a Balanced Portfolio competency provides the tools to implement Horizon Planning, visualize flow with Kanbans, and use economic prioritization to make the hard choices easier.

Stop letting the urgent crowd out the important.

Unlock the full SAFe Framework to build a portfolio that delivers today while securing your future. Get access by purchasing your SAFe® Insider membership today.

Get Started

In this Series:

¹ Moore, Geoffrey. Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption. Diversion Books, 2015.

Betting the Business on a Guess: When “Good Ideas” Waste Millions

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Editor’s Note: You’re facing unprecedented business challenges. You need more than theories—you need a blueprint. Welcome to a Leader’s Blueprint, your weekly guide to proven strategies that get results.

It’s the annual planning meeting, and the star project is unveiled—a massive digital transformation, a new product line, a major platform overhaul. It has executive backing, a compelling narrative, and a huge budget. Everyone nods; it feels right. The entire organization begins to mobilize, committing months, or even years, of effort to this single, big bet.

But deep down, a quiet question lingers: “How do we know this is what customers actually want?” Too often, the answer is, “We just do.” You’re building what you think the market needs, hoping your intuition pays off, all while precious resources are poured into an unvalidated future.

The Hidden Costs of Unvalidated Bets

When an investment is based on an unvalidated assumption—even a “really good” one—the cost isn’t just the initial budget. It’s a cascade of failures that silently drain your organization’s potential and can lead to significant financial losses.

  • Wasted Capacity: Entire departments spend months building a complex solution that customers don’t adopt, leading to 100% opportunity cost. That’s time and talent you will never get back, delaying other potentially valuable initiatives.
  • Delayed Value & Diminished Competitive Advantage: While you’re busy building the wrong thing, your competitors are capturing market share by solving the real customer problem first. This directly impacts your growth, market position, and ability to innovate, leaving you to play catch-up.
  • Eroding Morale: Nothing burns out a team faster than seeing their hard work and long hours shelved because the initial hypothesis was wrong. It breeds cynicism and resistance to the next big idea, impacting future productivity and retention.

From Gambling to Learning: A Glimpse of the Solution

The antidote to this high-stakes gambling is to treat big ideas not as directives, but as hypotheses. In SAFe®, this is the core of the Validating Investment Opportunities competency.

Instead of funding a massive, multi-year project, you fund the smallest possible experiment—a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)—designed to test a critical hypothesis with real customers. By applying a rapid Build-Measure-Learn cycle, you use real data—not opinions—to decide whether to pivot, persevere, or stop the initiative before you’ve wasted millions. This shifts the conversation from “Are we finished?” to “Did we learn?” It’s about reducing waste, de-risking innovation, and accelerating value delivery by ensuring your investments align with real customer needs.

Your First Step

You can start de-risking your investments this week. Look at the biggest, most expensive initiative (Epic) currently funded or being considered in your portfolio. Write down in the lean business case, what business outcome do we hypothesize will occur because this is delivered to our customers? Ask product leadership and architects, what’s the smallest thing we can build in under 3 months to see if that hypothesis might be true?

Then, gather the Epic Owner and relevant Business Owners and ask this one crucial question:

“What is the single, riskiest assumption this entire investment rests upon, and what is the cheapest, fastest experiment we could run next week to prove or disprove that assumption with real customer feedback?”

If the answer involves building a large part of the final product, you’re still planning a bet, not a validated investment. Your goal is to find the smallest actionable learning, not the first deliverable.

Unlock the Full Blueprint

Knowing you should test assumptions is easy. Building an organizational system that does it repeatedly, at scale, is hard. The Validating Investment Opportunities competency provides a complete blueprint for defining Epics, crafting compelling MVPs, and establishing the processes to make data-driven portfolio decisions that accelerate learning and value.

Stop betting the business on a guess.

Unlock the full SAFe Framework, with the competencies and guidance needed to build an organization that out-learns the competition. Get complete access by purchasing your SAFe® Insider membership today.

Get Started

In this Series:


1 Stanford University, “Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail,” VCS 2019 Conference Report, 2018, accessed October 28, 2025, https://conferences.law.stanford.edu/vcs2019/wp-content/uploads/sites/63/2018/09/001-top-10.pdf

Rowing in Different Directions: Don’t Let Your Legacy Portfolios Prevent Future Success

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Editor’s Note: You’re facing unprecedented business challenges. You need more than theories—you need a blueprint. Welcome to a Leader’s Blueprint, your weekly guide to proven strategies that get results.

You’ve just concluded the annual strategy offsite. The vision is bold, the goals are ambitious, and the leadership team is energized to conquer new markets. But when you and your peer portfolio leaders return to the office, the energy slowly fizzles out.

Despite the new slide decks, the new strategy never translates into action. Realignment is difficult; most companies have to hire expensive consulting firms just to untangle their organization and identify the value streams and product lines that matter. Because you lack a native model to organize these portfolios yourself, your funding and focus remain perfectly aligned to deliver last year’s strategy. You are trying to row in a new direction, but every portfolio is pulling its oar a different way.

The Hidden Costs of a Strategy-Structure Gap

When your organizational structure is not aligned with your strategic goals, it creates constant friction that silently sabotages your success.

  • Wasted Investment: Precious capital and talent are spent on low-priority work. Worse, different teams in different portfolios unknowingly duplicate efforts, solving the same problem in isolation and wasting valuable resources.
  • Strategic Drift: The company’s vision points north, but the inertia of the existing portfolios keeps pulling the execution south. This gap between what you say and what you do widens over time, making strategic goals impossible to reach.
  • Decision Paralysis: With unclear ownership of value streams, even simple decisions are endlessly escalated. Agility dies as leaders wait for approvals from committees that lack the context to make an informed choice.

From Complexity to Clarity: Identifying Value

The solution is to intentionally design your organization to match your strategy. In SAFe®, this is the Organizing Portfolios competency. This involves structuring your organization around clearly identified products, solutions and value streams—the end-to-end set of steps required to deliver a product or solution to a customer.

Instead of grouping people by function, you create a portfolio with all the people, funding, and authority needed to serve the value streams within it. This clarity of purpose and responsibility is what enables clear strategic execution. Teams are empowered to make fast, smart choices because they are fully aligned and have the context of the larger strategic goal.

Your First Step

You can begin to diagnose your strategy-structure gap this week with a simple exercise. Take your company’s single most important strategic goal for this year and ask your leaders:

“Which teams and which budgets are directly contributing to this goal?”

If they can’t draw that map with clarity in under 30 minutes, your organizational structure is obscuring—not enabling—your strategy.

Unlock the Full Blueprint

Visualizing the problem is the first step, but realigning an enterprise requires a proven approach. The Organizing Portfolios competency provides a complete blueprint for defining value streams, structuring portfolios for flow, and dynamically adapting them as your strategy evolves.

Stop letting your legacy portfolios dictate your strategy.

Unlock the full SAFe Framework, with the competencies and guidance needed to build an organization that can execute your vision. Get complete access by purchasing your SAFe® Insider membership today.

Get Started

In this Series:


1 Richard P. Rumelt, “Getting Strategy Wrong—and How to Do It Right Instead,” McKinsey Quarterly, accessed October 28, 2025, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/getting-strategy-wrong-and-how-to-do-it-right-instead