Many organizations have an organization chart, a delivery methodology, a portfolio process, and a technology architecture. That does not mean they have a coherent operating model.
The operating model sits between strategy and daily work
When that layer is weak, leaders compensate with escalation. Teams compensate with workarounds. Program managers compensate with coordination. Customers experience the accumulated friction as delay, inconsistency, or complexity.
A strong operating model makes the enterprise legible. People can answer: What outcomes are we organized around? Who owns them? Where are decisions made? How is capacity allocated? How does work enter the system? Which dependencies need executive attention? What measures determine whether the system is healthy?
Seven elements that have to work together
Value architecture
Products and value streams reflect how value is created, not simply how departments are arranged.
Decision rights
Authority is explicit enough that routine decisions do not require executive rescue.
Portfolio logic
Investment, prioritization, sequencing, and capacity are connected instead of managed in separate processes.
Governance
Forums exist to decide, resolve, escalate, and correct—not only to report.
Delivery system
Product, engineering, operations, risk, and change mechanisms support flow from idea through measurable outcome.
Performance system
Metrics reveal value, flow, reliability, customer impact, risk, and capacity rather than rewarding volume of activity.
Capability
Roles, leadership behavior, skills, and incentives reinforce the model after consultants leave.
Do not optimize each function independently and assume the enterprise will optimize itself. The expensive problems usually live in the handoffs between functions.
A recognizable pattern
The organization says “product,” but still operates by project.
Product leaders may own roadmaps but not capacity. Teams may be called persistent but are repeatedly reassigned. Funding may still arrive through temporary initiatives. Cross-functional dependencies still rise to executives because no one below them has enough authority to resolve the tradeoff.
That is not a terminology problem. It is evidence that the formal design and the real operating model are different.
Design tension
Control versus local speed is not solved by choosing one side.
Centralization can improve consistency, risk control, leverage, and scale. Decentralization can improve speed, customer proximity, and local judgment. The useful question is which decisions benefit from enterprise consistency and which become slower or less informed when pulled upward.
How to know the operating model is the problem
- Senior leaders repeatedly intervene in decisions that should be routine.
- Different portfolios use different definitions of priority, value, readiness, and done.
- Teams are busy while high-value outcomes remain delayed by dependencies or handoffs.
- Funding structures and organizational structures make it difficult to sustain end-to-end ownership.
- Product leaders own roadmaps but not enough capacity, decision authority, or business accountability to deliver them.
- Governance produces extensive reporting yet cross-enterprise problems persist for months.
What changes after a good redesign
The result should be visible in behavior. Fewer issues require escalation. Priority conflicts surface earlier. Leaders can see demand against capacity. Product and value-stream ownership becomes more meaningful. Technology and business decisions happen closer together. Governance becomes smaller and more consequential. Measures produce action.
At Discover Financial Services, the operating-model work included product/value-stream architecture, organizational structures, competency models, governance, decision rights, performance measures, DevSecOps practices, and an enterprise implementation approach. At Edward Jones, the work included senior governance, product/value-stream ownership, decision rights, metrics, and operating discipline across a very large transformation environment. Those experiences reinforce a simple lesson: operating models succeed when the pieces reinforce one another.
A useful executive design question
Instead of asking, “What should the future org chart look like?” ask: “What decisions and flows must become easier for the strategy to work?” Structure should follow that answer.
Executive decision
Which decisions should no longer require executive rescue?
Choose the recurring decisions that consume senior attention today—capacity shifts, dependency resolution, priority conflicts, product boundaries, risk exceptions—and deliberately place authority, evidence, and escalation thresholds where they belong.