Turning Project Chaos into Strategic Focus with Product Portfolio Thinking

In this episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast, Dave West is joined by PST Nabila Sattar Safdar to explore one of the toughest challenges organizations face today: agile product portfolio management.

Nabila talks about her experience leading the transition from a project-based to a product-based portfolio. Nabila shares how she reduced a backlog of over 100 projects to 30 strategic initiatives, aligned teams around value streams, and created a culture of learning and continuous improvement.

Listeners will hear practical strategies for:

• Partnering with leadership and steering committees to prioritize initiatives
• Using data to inform decisions while balancing learning with delivery
• Investing in team capability and training to close gaps
• Taking a holistic view of people, technology, and customer outcomes

Whether you’re a product leader, Scrum Master, or portfolio manager, this episode offers insights on how to make portfolio management more agile, strategic, and value-focused.

Transcript

moderator  0:00  
Welcome to the scrum.org community Podcast, the podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast, agile experts, including professional scrum trainers and other industry thought leaders, share their stories and experiences. We also explore hot topics in our space with thought provoking, challenging, energetic discussions. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Dave West  0:25  
Hello and welcome to the scrum.org community podcast. I'm your host, Dave West, CEO here@scrum.org in today's podcast, we're discussing agile product portfolio management. Some of you may have attended a recent webinar on the subject, where we discussed how organizations really need to change how they fund teams and how product fits into that approach. Now, much of the feedback from the webinar was, it's incredibly hard to change this. It's, it's just really, it's a really difficult subject. You're dealing with different departments and different parts of the organization, and it is. It's a complex and challenging journey. So I'm very, very lucky that I've got someone who has actually lived through the process and survived, which makes it even more more a great story to tell. And nabela Satta, professional scrum trainer, consultant and change agent has joined it. Joined our podcast today. Welcome to the podcast.

Nabila Safdar  1:27  
Nibbler, thank you, Dave. It's great to be here.

Dave West  1:32  
It's great to have you here. I Okay. Let me just tell our audience. So what inspired this podcast was I was at a face to face and fortunate to be talking and we it was just amazing, this journey, this story about the experiences that you went through. So I think it'd be really great for our listeners to get them up to speed on what the context was for when we're talking about this. So what was this? What was the situation? What was the context?

Nabila Safdar  2:06  
So for portfolio management, you know, my most of my career, I've been in a technology team. However, my formal education background, I'm not a technologist officially. So when I joined teams, the first challenge we were facing is that we would work through Project requests, and a traditional request would come in. And the challenge with the request would be, there may be in a list of sorts for about a year plus, and by time we have the authorization, or the approval to work on them, is the Ask still relevant? Is the topic still apply? And the questions were most about, when is it going to be done, versus what are we solving? And so that gave me a personal pause, because as stewards of an organization, the first thing we have to do is ask, what are we doing and why, and that really kind of set me down a path early on in my career, fortunately surrounded by fantastic mentors that helped me trust my instinct, essentially, and said, Okay, we need to revisit how we look at projects in general and the problems we have. We have projects. I had projects in my queue right behind a request similar that said we need to do a phase two because the Phase One was incomplete, it was rushed, it didn't have training associated with it. So all these elements that are very common and happen. And I would say no, project team really sets out with that intent in mind. But you know, reality just feels different near the end of our project. So took a few pauses and really decided that what we wanted to do is regroup around what do our value streams look like, starting our kind of the end in mind and working backwards, because you're a technology team, we're getting requests from all departments, plus we have our own ecosystem of 200 plus tools To maintain. It's getting more sophisticated, and it's very expensive, and we we're not unlimited of us. We are maybe a core team of six that is working through a lot of these elements. So we just essentially took a pause, restructured around well, we need to create what is our strategic initiative, create that alignment and work backwards into what teams and how would we do it? What's the how look like? And that's where all the messiness happens, and the magic happens, actually, and who, who's the talent that we need is our talent ready? It's not. Ready, then let's upscale and we'll create that environment and most of it from the start, I got a chance to do this at Vera Bradley. I started my journey at do about SCORM, and really learned a lot with fantastic teams there. And Vera Bradley, as we were evolving into our next technology group. We wanted to structure a portfolio that positioned learning as the core tenant of delivery, and to do that, we wanted to make sure our teams were empowered. Our steering committee was incredible. It was my first experience directly sitting as a participant on the steering committee, and they guided us through questions I should be asking myself, questions I should be asking my teams. We had table stakes. You know, the non negotiables? We said that the non negotiables were we were going to invest in training. We were going to invest in quality over urgency, and we were going to invest in really a product life cycle over a project. And if you've ever worked on a scrum team. You know, every sprint is a project, right? Has this start and end and a particular goal in mind. However, how you chain them together to really be impactful and sustainable really does need that product mindset. So this portfolio, which started with a traditional library of projects actually started to create a backlog of its own where we streamlined so we took, I think, about 100 plus projects when I joined the portfolio group and we narrowed it down to about 30 initiatives which piped through About six or seven teams suddenly decided to defer all together and really focus on what that alignment strategy was. And was really, really fortunate to work with teams for a few years just learning by doing. We were learning on the job every single day.

Dave West  7:22  
That sounds stressful, but let me so the first important point, so let me someone can summarize it, and then I'll jump to that first sort of like key question. So basically, when you were thrown into the situation, it was exactly like every IT organization. There was like a million requests coming in from a million different people, maybe not a million, but a lot. And there was multiple projects running. Teams were being sliced in 1516, directions. You look at their their calendars of the people on the teams, and you would see overlapping meetings and all that kind of stuff and and it was just the same as every IT organization. Probably there's just lots of demands on these, on these teams. And you, you, you took a step back and said, Well, hang on a minute. Let's look, let's ultimately step back from all of the work for a second and look at value streams, and then let's look at initiatives, and then let's look at the strategy, and then let's connect this to the portfolio, break down the work into that and then allocate it to the teams in that way, or at least focus those teams in that way. That sounds well, does that is that? Have I summarized it sort of, I mean, probably quite badly, but does that is that pretty much a summary. Yeah, that's a fantastic summary. Yes, oh yeah. So the second time you've told me, so I think I've actually learned it now. So which is great, always takes two mana my age. So the Okay, so number one, how the heck did you get your executives to agree that they're going to move to a value stream, you know, sort of product, sort of ish, sort of model, take a step back, because stuff's happening all the time. So how did you manage to persuade them?

Nabila Safdar  9:12  
Nabilah, and in this case, I believe even our leadership team was feeling the strain of the patterns that I described right across the organizations. So this is not unique to any particular organization or industry. Actually, these represent two different industries as well. In this case, however, is the sweet spot of understanding and recognizing the pattern. You know, the pattern is, we need to get better. We need to deliver quicker. We need to deliver. So once we talk about that, then the idea is, all right, are we ready to think differently? Are we ready to try something differently? Company, and really proposing the portfolio, in this case, as a nine month experiment, and taking on the responsibility that it is going to be in the partnership with the steering committee, not making any decisions in the vacuum it is intention is to communicate with every single aspect of the organization. We are a delivery partner. We're not necessarily the people who they have the right answers always. The answer is always coming from those that need the problem solved. So that really helped us, I think, really take that to the next step, is that our leadership was able to recognize the patterns we were seeing and had the grace to hear us out. Most importantly,

Dave West  10:54  
wow, that's that's a unique, awesome leadership, all right. So, and I think you, the other thing that you said, I just want to lean into a little bit, is it wasn't necessarily forever. It was, let's try this nine months. Let's Let's experiment, try and see if we can start getting some improvements that that sort of learning and horizon and risk management sort of point of view, that Scrum and Agile gives us, that they got that, and I think that that's that's unusual, which is really, really nice to hear. Okay, so you move into this thing, there's lots of questions I've got. And you know, in a palm, we talk a lot about an agile product operating model, but at a palm, we talk about evidence based. And you're going from a very project centric approach to an approach that's initiative strategic, connection, outcome centric, and dare I say, evidence how? What does that really mean? It when you started applying that those those thoughts to this portfolio,

Nabila Safdar  12:08  
it meant that we needed to understand that we didn't have all the evidence yet, because we had gaps. We did, we're not measuring, didn't measure all the elements to know if we were successful and why were we successful. It took the courage on all teams in the world to understand that, okay, what we need to do is understand what success looks like, right? So if we're setting off into this experiment together. What does success look like, and what are the pillars of the success? And I'm a fan of the innovation, innovation triangle, you know, people, Technology and Economics. It helps me stay grounded to understand I've looked at all the intersections of that triangle, and have been very intentional. So, okay, so what does economically, what is funding? How are we funding this? Okay, that's probably one of our hardest constraints. People we have fantastic people. Are they open to learning and retrying, or do they want different opportunities having those candid conversations, and then technology, what tools and are we removing, replacing, upgrading and, frankly, simplifying, because they're too complicated. So once we started to bring those together in that triangle, then our metrics became more about actually outcomes, starting with the what is going to be realized by the customer, and working inwards, because we have many customers. We have customers out in retail, we have customers internally across different divisions. We have customers across different countries in our supplier network. We have our actual customer that is actually purchasing the product and going through the experience and sharing that experience. And then we are also in our own little group each other's customers, as we have integration dependencies, so we really try to align and simplify them and the key individuals that really led that charge and would not be possible. Would as a product managers, they stepped into that role. It's a very complex role. There's so many elements to it. We had so many gaps, you know, if you can go back in time, we would do so many things different, right? But we don't have that wisdom in a change journey. So our journey was, what do we know now? Where do we want to get to? Let's focus on that and worry less about the gaps that we have along the way. So our empirical process was actually just about learning what we're doing. Now to the outcome and worrying less about kind of how we got here, because I've seen I've been guilty of it myself, too, when you are in deep change and you're already feeling the decision fatigue, because you have that bias of, oh, but if we get this wrong and that wrong, we're going to go back to how things used to be. This experiment will be called a failure within two months and etc. Worried less about that. Just kind of focus on moving forward, which, in my experience, helped my sanity to in the process,

Dave West  15:40  
I the one thing that I found interesting is that when you talk about evidence, you know, lot of people say, oh, let's focus on, you know, the customer outcomes. And, you know, revenue, customers eyes, whatever those things, and they are incredibly important, obviously. And you, you did mention that, but you also talked a little bit about technology and people. And you know, the fact is, you'd put measures in place and gather evidence around the capabilities of the people and their interests and where they were going. You that we in a palm we talk a lot about holistic, complete, a view of and one thing my conversations earlier as well that completeness is really unusual. Most of the time, people do this transition, and they're either very, very customer centric and then destroy their organization around it. They're very, very technology centric, so that they ignore the customer and end up not delivering as much value as they want. And very rarely are they people centric, actually, but it is interesting that you highlighted that holistic nature,

Nabila Safdar  16:56  
and I would say my best teacher has been the experience of failures, personal, professional failures, right where we as we have done all of these things. I've been one of those individuals where we walk into the boardroom and you're kind of avoiding eye contact because the news you have to share is not going to be very great news. However, the job is to be transparent. This is where we are. And walking away from those experience, I learned it's because did not have the complete triangle in mind, and that really has struck with me. It's what I continue to research and try to hone in further, especially now that we are, you know, five generations plus now an AI agent generation in our workforce. So this is only getting more complex,

Dave West  17:55  
yes, unfortunately, and for our listeners, really, is doing a PhD at the moment, doing lots of research on this, which I can't wait to read when it's published, because I think I'm going to learn lots from it. Okay, so, so executive sponsorship and support, walking into that boardroom that you mentioned, that must have been, you know, quite challenging, but one thing that you've done a really good job of was linking investments to outcomes. And how did you do that? And how did it work with agile and creativity, and not knowing everything up front that obviously people want to know that the strategy, the investments, the outcomes, they're all linked in this nice, linear way. But it's, from my experience, it's very little, very often, not that linear. And so how did you you know? What did you do around that? How did you get that, that that transparency,

Nabila Safdar  19:04  
it helped that we met at least quarterly so with the steering committee and always shared progress. So transparency is interesting, right? Transparency, I can show data all day. I can actually go through and read data all day as well on how initiatives are going. However, when they don't translate to actionable insights in a sense of I don't understand what I'm looking at. What are we looking at? What's the decision that we need to make? So when they started asking me these questions, I realized that actually walking into a boardroom conversation is less about an update, it's more about a partnership and really asking for help, because I think in the project culture, what a project culture did, which I had to unlearn quite quickly. In this experiment was created a distance between project teams and leadership, where you felt that if you're going to leadership, you're asking for more money, you're asking for more time, and you know, and then you're trying to negotiate what that looks like, etc, whereas in a product model, what we really are doing is we're looking to their fiduciary responsibility and partnership and asking, Okay, here what we believe is what we need to do here the questions we need to be asking so our statements have turned into questions, right? And here are the weeks of sprints is going to take us to really answer these questions, and in those we will have these recommendations and less if we do a what if analysis on these options, let's say, you know, we're doing some trade off elements and tool analysis when we get to the other side, here are some of The questions that we would be coming back and asking you, what information do you need from us when we come into that conversation? So really became a mentoring partnership. I learned so much from our financial officer, from my executive officer, technology officer as well, because they really, then focus more on teaching us, or what are they looking at when they're making these decisions? And we brought that back into our teams. Wow.

Dave West  21:30  
Mic drop the going in, because usually with a project culture, you go in really just asking for more money. Or, in fact, it's always asking for more money, really, but occasionally may be successful, but it you've got these sort of interim proxy metrics and things that everybody starts focusing on instead of actually those questions and those that, those that decision making process that you need to be in in partnership with your with your executive team, and I think I The other thing that you said, that I thought was just awesome, and I've never really thought about it before, is telling them what decisions they're going to have to make, and asking them what data they're going to need To make those decisions, which will then lead will obviously inform the next sprints or the next work that you do, because you'll be gathering that data to drive that in and and then equipping them with the right data to so that actually these meetings become less about asking for things and more about deciding together with the things that we're finding. So that the word partnership, it's easy to use, but it's rare that I hear it being applied quite as effectively as that. That's super cool, and it's actually consistent when we're talking to Toyota about their portfolio planning, one of the most important elements of that was transparency to create that partnership and those choices and those trade offs between, you know, the car people and the technology people and the supplier people and the salesy people. They have all sorts of people, but cars are complicated, but and very similar, which is, which is good to hear. And then once you're doing that, how did those meetings go? What was, was everybody on the same page? I can imagine it. They still could be quite stressful,

Nabila Safdar  23:41  
and they can be stressful. And I would say any conversation on important topics is stressful, right? Because I've come to learn that when we are stressed in a conversation, it's because the people at the table care. And part of me is just going back into my scrum master hat and just, you know, remaining curious and really looking for that keen understanding of I understand their differences and priorities. Again, even within a quarter. Can imagine how much can change, right? And there's a lot of disruption. Perhaps, schedules have become Fuller and we haven't been able to maybe get real time feedback on certain initiatives, so the teams have moved forward, and now the stress of could be, well, you should have asked the question differently. You should have surface absolutely listening, listening for all the advice of what we can do, also in that opportunity asking for what boundaries can we have that way we can be enabled within those boundaries to make our judgment calls, because we know that you are doing what you need to do, and your plates are full already, if not overflowing. Hmm, so really, again, creating that, okay, coaches walk us through going back in time that we moved forward with an assumption because we didn't have that information, we missed a conversation. All individuals involved meant well, this was not intentional. So going back, what it can we do in that boundaries? What should we learn? And that actually helped fuel some of our learning curriculum in teams.

Dave West  25:31  
Oh, interesting. So you actually, gosh, this goes back to the holistic thing. So these processes, when you're having these steering group meetings or quarterly business reviews or whatever you would, you would actually then use these as, oh, well, there's an opportunity now for us to improve the capability of our teammates. Because we missed this. Maybe we should have done, you know, maybe I know, could you lose a Lean Canvas to elicit certain key, key metrics, or we could have done a much better job of managing technical debt or contractor relationships or whatever. Let's update our training, and let's let's actually spend maybe some time then the next order actually fixing that. You actually did that?

Nabila Safdar  26:24  
Yeah, works with our teams. And decision fatigue is real. I would say even product management cycles and product team structures, one of the, I think, most underrated realizations is that you're going to face decision fatigue. Because in Project structures, you really have a project manager. You have your sponsor that's usually making the decisions, and you're doing the work. But in product structures, the decisions come to you, because now for everything you're doing, you're accountable for that whole life cycle. So, yes, what we did is, when all possible, we were reserving about 20% of capacity to learn.

Dave West  27:12  
Wow, that's that's incredible. And, and, and, how did you I mean at that your executives have to believe, then that ultimately, you're an organization that is made up of people. The skills of those people determine the success of the organization, and continuous investment in those skills will have a material impact on the business, they have to believe that not just put it on a poster.

Nabila Safdar  27:46  
Well, I would say, and the reason they believe that is because they can see it empirically. The teams are flourishing. Value is seen, right? So it's not something that we go sell to an executive team. So one of the first commitments I made early on as a scrum master, and a lot of leaders have found this funny, is they heard me say that I'm not here to sell you agile, right? I am a science nerd in a sense. I've loved experiments growing up. And to me, every project kind of has a scientific approach to it, and give us the opportunity to run the experiment. Let's see what we want to control, what are variables, etc, and work through those models. And I think that over time, just creates that culture in teams as well. Okay, so I would go back and ask, you know, when we are learning, what are we learning, and what control do we have to make sure that we have the consistent commitment to still delivering results? You can't invest a whole quarter just learning. We still have to operate and deliver value to all of our customers. So it's just that balance. One sprint is a little heavy, a little press, next Sprint's a little lighter,

Dave West  29:14  
and that, and that's the reason why, you know, we got this, this very discovery delivery and even support. In terms of the value stream in a palm there isn't distinct separation. Many product organizations separate discovery from delivery and definitely third level support, and they have different teams working on it different people, I believe very strongly that you need to commingle that and you did exactly the same thing. And yes, some sprints will be more. Horizon two oriented. Horizon three oriented, or even horizon one oriented, when that client that has got that bug. That wasn't a bug, but turned into a bug was a feature and that you have to fix because, because you just do so. I think that commingling of the of discovery delivery and third level support is is crucial from from a learning point of view,

Nabila Safdar  30:21  
yes, and a very, very fortunate, like I said, also in how well the teams came together,

Dave West  30:34  
yeah, and that was to submit, I mean, obviously great teams, but I think it's also a great testament to you creating an environment that allowed those teams to come together and the leaders around you creating that environment.

Nabila Safdar  30:47  
Absolutely it is one of the, I think, elements, if I could go back and wish we did different when it came to learning, is just creating that balance. One element that we learned is all the feeling of always being on, always on. If you've ever had that feeling that 11pm eastern you're trying to get ready for bed and oh no, something isn't working. Now, Product Manager is on call. A developer is on call. The team is working through the evening to or is a resolution, and then the same team is showing up in the morning, working on Well, the commitment of the sprint, finding that balance between delivering what's next to operating what we have, oh, is a balance that I feel more teams. If I could go back in time, I would like to experiment even more with that balance.

Dave West  31:52  
Yeah, I think it's important. I think one by making those things transparent and by getting that level of ownership, you obviously do have to deal with the very personal desire of teammates to always be available, always be working, always be delivering on their commitments, whilst also managing the fact that you're going to burn out your teams and they're going to burn out And and so and I think making those things transparent, and this is the power of having them all as one team. Because one thing is, when you've got that production problem in the middle of night, that's actually a great learning opportunity. There's nothing. Suddenly you're like, yeah, maybe we should create a mirror environment that we can quickly experiment in the middle of, you know, for instance, or, oh my gosh, look at that. That architecture is so brittle because it's a bunch of hard coded things. So to do the deployment takes, takes me manually doing it, and in the middle of the night, I'm not very viable. So, you know, you get that great and that then feeds back into, you know, ultimately, sprints and other things. But you also get that sort of, like understanding the sort of pride and ownership that you can you can't get that from just knowing that somebody maintains or supports your thing. It's great. That's absolutely awesome. All right, we're coming up to the time, and I could talk to you all day about this, because you've done some amazing things, and I'm so grateful for having you spend the time with us today, but our listeners are, you know, mucking about with portfolio planning, maybe thinking about products, thinking about value streams. What if there's, if they're at the start of this journey, what would you say the first thing that they should do is, well, it doesn't have to be one thing, but, you know, the first couple of things, or the first one thing, what would you what would you do now, if you moved into an organization that was in the position that we talked about earlier. You know, lots of work, lots of projects over these teams in what would you do first?

Nabila Safdar  34:10  
I would be very curious, and I would ask the teams, what does value delivery look like? What is a current state of affairs, really inspect that, and how do we know that value has consistent quality? Right has a commitment to service, right has a growth and the learning trajectory, and start to inspect those aspects, and then really use that as anecdotal context into what we could do next. And if we could, this is the first step we would take. And if we could really stretch ourselves, this is where we would want to be six months from. Now, nine months from now, a year from now, and really start to work backwards.

Dave West  35:04  
Well, thank you spending the time today on the scrum.org community podcast. I've definitely enjoyed listening and and hearing the second time. I think now I remember some of it, which is awesome. But thank you for that. And listeners, thank you for listening. Today. You heard Nabila Sattar, professional scrum trainer, consultant and change agent, talking about her journey around agile product portfolio management. And there's a couple of things I took away, but just two things I'm going to leave you with. One is that partnership conversation with the steering committee, the way that she changed the relationship between the leadership in the organization and the people delivering value, and changed it into a partnership, which I thought was super interesting. She what, there's probably some cool way of saying this, but she she flipped the conversation, turned it round. And I think that was good for everybody, and made everybody part of the solution, not the problem. And the other thing that that struck me was this learning throughout the fact that learning is integrated into the cycle. It isn't just this sort of like nice to have over there in the corner and and I think that's super important, and it's something we talk about with the Agile product operating model. People are a fundamental part of this, and we need to invest in it, in these people. Obviously, AI changes a lot, but it still means that we need to equip our teams with the skills that we, that we, that we need to solve the problems. So hopefully, ladies and gentlemen, you enjoyed today's conversation. Thanks for listening to today scrum.org, community podcast. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, share with friends, and of course, come back and listen to some more. I'm lucky enough to have a variety of guests talking about everything in the area. Professional Scrum, product thinking and, of course, agile. Thanks, everybody. Scrum on foreign you.

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