Portfolio Planning - Agile portfolio planning for Lawns ‘R’ Us

• Agile portfolio planning is a great (chief) product owner tool to plan and trace initiatives across various teams
• Business goal alignment on value creation
• Number 1 critical success factor: Outcome oriented decision making, since Outcome Goals:
  • streamline the Agile portfolio planning
  • Engage people involved
  • enables to judge all ideas based on their contribution to these goals
  • creates focus and clarity
  • Helps PO to explain to others where and when people will work on certain ideas, as well as saying no to the irrelevant one
• Using Simple 2 by 2 frameworks
• Model: Agile Portfolio Planning (Portfolio Wall)
  • Table with:
    • Team (capacity) / Iteration Number (time)
    • In the cells created: Outcome Goals
  • They like it because:
    • Allows SH to get an easy overview of which team is working on what topic
    • SH can see if the portfolio plan adheres to overall priorities and discuss dependencies or issues
    • Teams can look a bit ahead and see where they are heading towards
  • Several problems, that were fixed by adding outcome focused goals
    • Outcome is something different than output:
      • Output goals are geared towards doing things: cheaper, better, faster
      • Outcome is about why we want to achieve something instead of how (output)
    • outcome goals are much more engaging if backed by an inspiring strategy and vision
  • LRU crafted their outcome ambition by adding strategic- and product goals
  • They laid out their strategic outlook and formulated accompanying goals for LRU as a whole
  • Next, they tried to make their goals SMART…. That’s were their product planning came in:
• Model: Product Planning (BCG Matrix) FOR PRODUCTS
  • Created to better achieve Business Goals
  • To evaluate if it is worth to invest in a product or not
  • identify their product/market combinations and analyze their respective market positions
  • simple, easy to understand and provided a holistic overview of the product portfolio
  • 4 quadrants:
    • Market Growth / Market Share:
      • LOW Market Growth / LOW Market Share: “DOG” Divest
      • LOW Market Growth / HIGH Market Share: “CASH COW” Harvest and Protect
      • HIGH Market Growth / LOW Market Share: “?” Validate
      • HIGH Market Growth / HIGH Market Share: “STAR” Invest and Grow
    • Dots located in the Map, representing products
• Model: Decision Mapping Framework FOR IDEAS
  • To evaluate initiatives/Ideas for each product within the context of the set goals
  • Is the initiative going to contribute and if so, how much and at what cost?
  • 4 quadrants:
    • Relative Effort / Impact on goal:
      • HIGH Relative Effort / LOW Impact on goal: Say NO
      • HIGH Relative Effort / HIGH Impact on goal: Simplify? 🡪 Do First
      • LOW Relative Effort / LOW Impact on goal: Smarter? 🡪 Do First
      • LOW Relative Effort / HIGH Impact on goal: Do First
        • more detailed analysis of them to prioritize amongst them
    • Dots located in the Map, representing Ideas
• non-product related projects
  • initiatives and projects with regards to companywide operational excellence or mandatory legislation that just had to be done regardless of anything else
    • operational excellence initiatives
      • create the rational on how operational excellence would benefit outcome strategic goal
    • Legislation
      • proved to be more difficult
    • internal facing product
      • example: responsible for a back-office process like customer support. What would you like your net promoter score to look like?