Cesario Ramos

Portfolio management makes sure that money and people actually follow strategy, not just PowerPoint slides. When strategy and spending are misaligned, too many initiatives run in parallel, good ideas wait for funding, bad ideas keep going, and coordination overload quietly increases cost, risk and complexity. In CAO, the organisation is structured into product groups (with value areas), commodity platforms, and go-to-market units. Portfolio management decides how investment flows across these three: which product groups and value areas to grow or shrink, and which platforms to build, extend or retire—managed via a global portfolio, product group portfolios and platform portfolios. The model shifts focus from approving small projects to making a few clear strategic bets. With clear KPIs, loosely coupled product groups and shared platforms, leaders get sharper accountability, faster change, and better control of cost and complexity—especially when global portfolios are framed as product–market plays that align product, platform capacity and commercial focus around the same bets.

With one Scrum Team, most people agree it’s easy to shape your Scrum in many ways. You can aim for innovation, efficiency, or customer-specific work. Just use different practices and it works. Once you add a scaling framework, that flexibility drops. The real optimisation goal shows up. Many times the focus is on: small batches, smooth flow, overlapping skills, standards, waste elimination, reuse. All very useful, but mainly about efficiency. ( Which is okay, actually in my experience it is what orgs want most of the time... efficiency and predictability! ) Those same ideas do not always help when you explore new products or co-create tailored solutions with customers. There, learning, experiments and customer-specific choices may matter more than waste reduction, avoiding duplication or efficiency. So what? Well, if it’s unclear what you optimise for, you might ask for innovation and customer focus, but design a setup mostly for efficiency. The result: strategy and org design become unaligned, and not so very good things happen. Now what? Be explicit about which one you’re really optimising for. And then look at the frameworks principles/mechanics and ask: What are these really trying to maximise?

In fast-changing markets, traditional hierarchies still help leaders see the big picture, but they struggle to keep pace with reality. As information travels upward and decisions come back down, organizations risk losing focus on customers and slowing adaptation. Agile organizations take a different approach: they emphasize connectivity over control. Decisions move closer to the customer, supported by connected teams, shared data, and shorter feedback loops. Creating Agile Organizations (CAO) reframes the challenge: Shift from reporting to connecting across teams. Design for tight coupling inside product groups and loose coupling between them. Use AI to amplify local decision-making, not to recentralize control. The result — organizations that move fast locally while staying coherent globally.

Many confuse operating models with organization design. Operating models, as defined by Jeanne W. Ross focus on daily operations, resources, governance, planning, performance but are too narrow to shape the whole org-design. Organization design, shown in the Star Model by Jay Galbraith, aligns strategy, structure, processes, rewards, and people. Confusing the two causes local fixes without systemic change — and culture quickly eats strategy when the system stays the same.

Adding teams rarely speeds up delivery it often makes things worse by increasing dependencies and coordination overhead. Study the system first, use proven tools to uncover real design issues. The fix isn’t more teams, it’s smarter organizational design.

Most large organizations already have product teams, platform services, and customer-facing solutions, but they often work in isolation, creating delays, duplicated work, and poor customer outcomes. The real problem isn’t in the technology but how the organization is structured. This article breaks down a clear pattern for aligning these three layers: Platform provides shared, enabling services without becoming a bottleneck. Product groups own strategy, delivery, and performance of their products end-to-end. Customer solution teams take full responsibility for delivering integrated offerings that solve real customer problems. By separating concerns and assigning clear ownership, organizations can move faster, reduce friction, and deliver value without falling into silo traps.

Across organizations of all sizes, I hear the same concerns. They are all expressed different but the common theme is: “Won’t embedded specialists be underutilized?” “Isn’t decentralization too costly or inconsistent?” “Shouldn’t we have one standard way of working?” These aren’t complaints, they’re tradeoffs. And tradeoffs only make sense when you’re clear on what you’re optimizing for.

You might think agility is something you apply uniformly. And if you are working in a large org, you have probably heard someone propose that “we all should have one way of working”. A standard way across the entire company. I am here to share that, in my experience, this does not make much sense most of the time. Different Flavours of Adaptability Different parts of a business move at different speeds, operate under various constraints, and require different types of adaptability. Also, not all products are in the same phase. Some might be emerging, with lots of uncertainty, others might be ready for scaling up, and others are mature. All these differences require a different flavour of agile, in terms of adaptability, governance, budgeting, processes and structure.

New tools, frameworks, and best practices seem to appear every week—and many organizations adopt them without stepping back to ask a simple, but critical question: Does this support the way we compete? At the heart of good companies is a clear strategy—how you create value in the market. While there are many variations, most organizations compete along one of three fundamental value dimensions

Change is inevitable in any organization, from shifting markets to evolving customer expectations. Agile frameworks can help navigate these challenges, but they must evolve alongside the organization. While generative frameworks adapt and grow, rigid ones impose fixed solutions that may become obsolete over time. The key is ensuring your framework supports, rather than hinders, your organization's progress.