Give every system an owner who can retire it
Run technology as products
Sound familiar?
- Technology is funded as projects. When the project closes, nothing and nobody owns what it built.
- Nothing ever gets stopped. Technology just adds.
- Your internal technology teams are cost centres. They have budgets, but no customers, no pricing and no roadmap anyone outside the team has read.
- You pay for a platform's full feature set and use a fifth of it.
What I do
I apply commercial product management, the Pragmatic Institute framework, to technology that has never had it: internal platforms, shared services, cost centres, vendor products. Each one gets a product owner with real authority, a roadmap, KPIs and a price. Product councils, chaired by the executives who own the money, review the portfolio. I coach the product managers and owners into the roles, because the model only works once they're saying no to things.
What it has produced
Scotiabank's product operating model, adopted by the Global CIO: product councils, KPIs reported to the Board, a global app store, and hundreds of product managers and owners coached. 533 applications retired and 318 globalised across 12 SVPs, one version serving many countries. → Scotiabank product operating model
At Deutsche Bank, developer tooling run as a product for 25,000 technologists: four tool stacks into one, output up 30%, vendor headcount down 50%. → Deutsche Bank developer tooling
For Puppet, GitHub and Synopsys, product strategy from the buyer's side of the table: roadmaps, customer panels and the regulatory answers that get a vendor through a bank's procurement. → Selling software into banks
How we'd start
Pick one cost centre or platform. In eight weeks it has an owner, a customer list, a roadmap and a first set of KPIs, and the owner has made the first hard call. Then the model scales to the rest.