The Problem to be Solved

As of today, many companies are in the process of moving their IT solution management from the more traditional demand-supply model to the more modern product organizational model.

Requirements are no longer handed over between business departments and the central IT department; people from both line organizations move together into a work organization in the middle, centered around digital products, which are managed in close collaboration.

Business takes over the lead for the direction of the product (sending the product owner role to the product team in question) and IT contributes the necessary tech skills.

Such an organization is no longer one traditional reporting hierarchy; it now has two dimensions (the line organization and the work organization), which fulfill different purposes and which are both necessary to manage a complex portfolio of interdependent digital products.

The line organization cares for providing the right people with the right skills, who take over standardized roles in the work organization, sets quality & tools-of-the-trade standards and also enables the further development of the people in their respective roles.

Such line organizations are often called chapter organizations (a term which was originally coined by Spotify) and are organized by roles and skills (e.g. Java Development Chapter, DevOps Chapter, Quality Assurance Chapter, etc.).

The work organization is often organized around the model of the business domain map, which is a structure consisting of horizontal lanes (usually representing core business process chains like Sales, Purchasing, Logistics etc), domains inside of the lanes (representing business capability clusters like Category Management, Warehouse Management, etc) and finally products (implementing a concrete set of related business capabilities with the help of one or more applications).

All of the three levels (lanes, domains and products) usually derive an individual strategy from the overall business strategy, define concrete goals and finally create and execute a business roadmap, which is essentially a set of concrete things to implement usually in multiple time slices of a years quarters.

The overall processes in the work organization are considered lean and agile (output-oriented), everything is done in small increments and uncertainty is not an enemy (things can change often, whenever new knowledge and insights are gained).

In general, the work organization strives to be a high performance organization, borrowing principles of lean and agile management.