Delivering Compelling Products through Progressive Portfolio Refinement

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At Intel, we are faced with some hairy challenges: how do we create a clear line of sight from the highest levels of strategic vision to a concrete expression of a feature? How do we effectively prioritize work across the portfolio so we can allocate resources appropriately? And how do we make the voice of the customer come alive in the backlog to deliver more compelling products?

Our approach has been to progressively refine strategic value through a set of interactive, light-weight workshops translating executive intent into concrete work. By including a cross-functional set of executives at the start, defining an economic framework, identifying the job to be done and facilitating more conversations and interactions at different levels of the organization, we’ve been able to spend less time on non-value added activities and more time on product development. Along the way, we were able to reduce organizational WIP, understand what’s really important to our business and ultimately create a more engaged organization.

This talk takes you through a step-by-step overview of how we got to where we are now. We’ll illustrate the problems we were faced with, show how progressive refinement across our portfolio helped us solve them and demonstrate the benefits we gained as a result. We’ll also be transparent about our challenges and show you some of the efforts that didn’t work.

At the end of this talk, you’ll be familiar with a set of tools and practices that will help your organization align strategy with execution. You’ll do more of the things that matter and less of the things that don’t. Albeit not a silver bullet, an intentional approach to progressive portfolio refinement supports business agility across the enterprise.