As Agile adoption spreads across entire organizations, many leaders find themselves grappling with a fundamental mismatch between how their company is structured and how value is actually delivered. Traditional project-based operating models, optimized for predictability and control, often obstruct the very agility that teams seek to achieve.
The Product Operating Model (POM) offers a compelling alternative. It reorganizes teams, funding, and governance around enduring products rather than transient projects. In doing so, it creates the conditions for continuous delivery, customer focus, and strategic alignment - making agility sustainable at scale.
Origins
The POM is not born from a single framework or certification path. Instead, it emerged from the collective learning of product-centric organizations like Amazon, Spotify, Atlassian, and a growing wave of digital-native enterprises.
Its lineage can be traced to:
- Lean Enterprise thinking, which called for long-lived, cross-functional teams focused on flow and learning.
- Modern product management, championed by thinkers like Marty Cagan and Melissa Perri, who emphasized the shift from delivering features to solving problems.
- Agile practitioners and coaches who recognized that team-level agility was insufficient without structural alignment at the organizational level.
In essence, the Product Operating Model evolved as a pragmatic response to the limitations of project-centric delivery in fast-moving, customer-facing environments.
Core Characteristics of the Product Operating Model
At its heart, the POM reorganizes how an enterprise thinks about work, outcomes, and accountability. Rather than funding temporary initiatives, the organization funds durable product teams that own customer outcomes over time. These teams are structured around products that represent distinct customer problems, journeys, or service domains.
Where a traditional operating model centers on:
- Projects
- Departments
- Milestone tracking
- Upfront scoping and resource allocation
A POM centers on:
- Products or product slices
- Cross-functional, autonomous teams
- Outcome-based governance
- Iterative discovery and delivery
Key Roles Within a Product Operating Model
Although the POM does not prescribe roles in the way Scrum or SAFe might, certain roles consistently emerge to support flow, autonomy, and alignment.
Product Manager:
The Product Manager (or Product Owner in some Agile frameworks) serves as the connective tissue between customer needs, business strategy, and technical delivery. Their responsibilities extend across product discovery, roadmap ownership, outcome definition, and prioritization. Strong Product Managers think in terms of problems, not solutions, and help the team focus on learning and delivering value.
Engineering Manager or Tech Lead:
Engineering Manager or Tech Lead
Designers and UX Researchers:
Embedded in or shared across teams, designers play a critical role in shaping experiences and validating hypotheses. Their discovery work helps ensure teams are solving real problems, not just building what's been requested. UX Researchers, when present, ground the team's decisions in real user data.
ProductOps:
Product Operations emerges as a critical function as product scale increases. This team standardizes tools, rituals, insights, and workflows that enable consistency without rigidity. ProductOps might maintain roadmap templates, facilitate quarterly planning, or manage product analytics and feedback tools.
Group Product Managers or Product Directors:
At the portfolio level, these leaders oversee multiple teams or product domains. They align product teams to strategy, coordinate cross-product dependencies, and support prioritization across business goals and customer journeys.
Coaching in the Product Operating Model
One of the least-defined but most important aspects of the POM is coaching. Unlike team-centric Agile frameworks, the POM does not naturally assign a single coaching role. Instead, coaching is often distributed, or neglected entirely.
When implemented well, coaching support appears in several forms:
- Team-level Agile Coaches or Scrum Masters help teams improve collaboration, flow, and continuous improvement.
- Product Managers coach the team on product thinking, customer focus, and prioritization, though they often need coaching themselves to avoid defaulting to solution delivery.
- Engineering Managers coach on technical quality, development practices, and sustainable delivery rhythms.
- External or enterprise coaches often step in to support system-level change and leadership development, especially during early POM transitions.
In high-maturity environments, coaching becomes a shared responsibility that is intentionally cultivated and resourced.
Rhythms and Events:
The Product Operating Model does not enforce fixed ceremonies like Sprint Planning or PI Planning. Instead, it encourages each team and portfolio to adopt the cadence that supports its context, while ensuring that learning, alignment, and visibility are maintained.
Common team-level rhythms include:
- Sprint or Iteration Planning, where near-term priorities are selected and discussed.
- Discovery Syncs, where product, design, and engineering review new opportunities and data.
- Demo or Review Sessions, used to validate whether delivery matched intention.
- Retrospectives, held regularly to improve team dynamics, flow, and effectiveness.
At the product or portfolio level, key rhythms may include:
- Quarterly Roadmap Planning, focused on sequencing outcomes, not locking in features.
- Monthly Product Reviews, where teams share what they've learned, delivered, and are planning next.
- Cross-Team Syncs or Dependency Mapping Sessions, particularly when multiple teams contribute to a larger customer journey.
These rhythms create a tempo of learning and adjustment while enabling team autonomy within a coordinated whole.
Artifacts and Tools:
The POM discourages excessive documentation and heavyweight approvals, but relies on a few core artifacts that evolve over time to maintain clarity and strategic alignment.
These typically include:
- Product Vision and Narrative: A clear articulation of what the product is and why it matters.
- Roadmap: Often structured as "now, next, later" focused on customer outcomes or problem spaces, not feature timelines.
- OKRs or KPIs: Tied to the product's purpose and used to steer investment and assess progress.
- Discovery Backlog: A repository of unvalidated ideas, hypotheses, or customer problems still in the research phase.
- Delivery Backlog: Prioritized, actionable work items the team has committed to explore, design, or build.
- Analytics Dashboards: Real-time or near-real-time tracking of customer behavior, usage, and product health.
These artifacts are lightweight and co-created, evolving with the product as it moves through discovery and delivery cycles.
Product Requirements in a POM Context:
While traditional requirement documents are de-emphasized, requirements are not abandoned. They are instead reframed through collaborative, iterative discovery. Effective requirements in a POM context often take the form of:
- Problem Statements that frame the user's need or challenge.
- Hypotheses that describe potential solutions and how they'll be tested.
- Acceptance Criteria used to define done-ness and guide development.
- Journey Maps or Story Maps that outline user flows and highlight critical gaps.
- SLOs (Service Level Objectives) especially for platform or shared service teams.
Requirements are thus embedded in team conversations and decision-making tools, not formal documents handed off for implementation.
When to Use a Product Operating Model:
The POM is ideal when:
- The organization delivers digital products or services with ongoing customer interaction.
- Cross-functional collaboration is essential to solving problems, not just completing tasks.
- The business strategy is built around customer growth, retention, or engagement.
- Leadership is ready to shift from command-and-control to intent and enablement.
It may not be suitable when:
- The organization works primarily on fixed-scope, contract-based work.
- Teams lack autonomy, and the culture resists experimentation.
- Leadership is unwilling to shift funding, incentives, and governance from project models.
Comparison to Other Models:
Unlike traditional project-based models, the POM reduces handoffs, delays, and confusion by placing ownership with persistent teams. Compared to SAFe, which introduces more structured roles and ceremonies, POM is lighter and more adaptable, with fewer imposed layers.
The Spotify Model and POM share cultural DNA, but Spotify emphasizes team identity and flow, while POM emphasizes business alignment and product structure. POM is often easier to evolve within traditional companies because it focuses on strategy and funding mechanisms, not just rituals or team naming.
Key Takeaways
- The POM replaces projects with durable product teams aligned to customer value.
- Roles evolve to support discovery, delivery, and leadership across the product lifecycle.
- Coaching must be intentional and distributed, or it risks disappearing.
- Success is measured by outcomes, not activity, and anchored by shared rhythms and lightweight artifacts.
- The model thrives where there is strategic clarity, executive sponsorship, and product mindset maturity.
Summary
The Product Operating Model restructures organizations around long-lived, outcome-driven product teams that are empowered to deliver continuous value. Unlike traditional project models, which optimize for predictability and control, the POM emphasizes autonomy, flow, and strategic alignment with customer needs. It shifts the focus from completing tasks to solving meaningful problems.
By centering teams on real products, supported by product leadership, lightweight governance, and clear cadences, the model creates the conditions for sustainable agility at scale. Key roles evolve to support discovery, delivery, and system health, while coaching becomes a shared responsibility across product, technical, and operational functions.
Artifacts such as roadmaps, OKRs, and backlogs remain, but they are reframed as living tools that support iteration and learning. The POM thrives in environments where product thinking is embraced, funding models are flexible, and leadership is committed to enabling value creation rather than directing it.
For organizations seeking to move beyond rigid process frameworks and toward genuine product agility, the Product Operating Model offers a grounded, systems-based path forward.
Coaching Tips
- Frame the Shift: Help teams and leaders see that this is not just structural, it's cultural. A POM requires new mindsets around ownership, funding, and learning.
- Name the Coaches: Every team needs coaching support, technical, delivery, and product. Make these roles visible and supported.
- Support Product Managers Relentlessly: Without proper coaching and enablement, they are likely to become overburdened backlog managers instead of empowered value leaders.
- Clarify Product Boundaries: If it's not clear what a team owns, their autonomy will always be undermined. Product taxonomies help reduce overlap and confusion.
- Start Small, Scale Intentionally: Pilot POMs within one domain or portfolio first. Let success stories shape wider adoption.
