Four questions anyone should be able to answer
Where this works, anybody in the company can answer four questions without asking: what are we trying to achieve, how will we know whether it worked, who owns which risk, and where is that written down. Where it does not, the answers sit in a few heads and arrive late, and every other investment gets discounted by it. Research nobody acts on, a design system nobody adopts and a shipping record nobody can tie back to a goal are one problem seen from three sides.
Done badly it is a process rollout. A new framework, a kickoff deck, a set of ceremonies, and six weeks later the teams are doing what they always did with new vocabulary for it. That version fails because it asks people to work differently while leaving untouched the things that decide how they actually work: where their roadmap arrives from, what their goals are measured against, and who carries the consequence when a call goes wrong.
So the order matters more than the content. The agreement has to exist above the teams, and in writing, before anybody is asked to run a different ceremony. Ceremonies come last, and by then they mostly pick themselves.
Chris Nill, the Chief Growth Officer who hired me at FTI Group, described the result in his recommendation as “structuring the entire Product Management function leading to a way more mature setup around defined KPIs (OKRs), clear roles and structured communication.”
That is the work. It has gone in three times now, and it is still the work that never appears in a portfolio, because what it produces is four answers rather than a screen.
Two companies, the same four questions
Conrad Electronic. Seven product teams already shipping, still organized around projects specified elsewhere. The shift to team ownership, continuous discovery and OKRs, agreed with the Head of Product, the Director Product Management and the CPTO before any team was asked to work differently.
FTI Group. More than 11,000 employees across over 90 subsidiaries. Defined roles and accountabilities, the Product Trio, OKRs tracked in the open, the Double Diamond as a shared shape, and a communication model that reached across the brands.
A third, at Smart InsurTech, went in while the company was learning to work as a product organization, sponsored by an executive board member.
Each of those pages carries its own decisions: the two or three moments where the argument changed what was going to happen, with what was planned, what I argued and what followed.
What is the same every time
Written down beats understood. Every role has a scope and an accountability on paper, which is what a new joiner can act on in their first week.
One place where goals live, visible to everyone. OKRs that a team in another department can read are the only ones that coordinate anything.
Risk split three ways and owned by name. Value, usability, feasibility. A decision with three owners who each know which risk is theirs moves faster than one with a committee.
A prioritization artefact before the backlog. A one-pager, a matrix, a traceable hypothesis. The format matters less than the rule that nothing skips it.
An executive line. At FTI the reporting line was to the Chief Growth Officer, at Smart InsurTech the sponsor was an executive board member, at Conrad the line runs through the three roles that own the OKRs. This kind of change is an organizational change and it fails without one.
Career paths that do not require becoming a manager. A senior researcher or designer has to be able to grow while staying in the craft. Where that ladder is missing, the best practitioners leave for a title somewhere else.
What differs, and why it matters
The resistance was the opposite shape each time, and that is the part worth knowing.
Conrad ships every week. An argument for changing how a company decides has to be made there against visible evidence that the current way works, which is the harder version of the problem, and it has to be made to three peers who each own part of the answer. FTI Group had grown by buying companies: more than 90 subsidiaries, each with its own way of working, every one of them locally sensible and none of them reaching the others. There the change was less a correction than a shared shape, argued through a single reporting line in a group where every brand still decided for itself how it worked.
They also sit at different distances from an outcome. The FTI work is finished, and it ended in an insolvency that had nothing to do with it. The Conrad work is in progress, agreed at the top, visible in the backlog, and still short of a number.
The order held through all of it, while the scale, the starting point and the kind of authority available all changed. Having done this in a federation and on a single shipping platform is the claim neither one makes on its own.
What I would do differently
Measure it like the design system was measured.
At FTI the design system had a return on investment model and kept its funding through a difficult year. The operating-model work had better stories and no equivalent figure, which made it the easier thing to question whenever budget got tight. A number on decision quality, for example the share of roadmap items traceable to evidence, would have made the case without needing me in the room.
Culture change that is not measured has to be re-argued every quarter.