Why Product Thinking Deserves a Place in the Operating Model

Over the past months I’ve refined the Value Visionary Operating Model and recently added a new supporting concept: Product Thinking.

Not as another building block, but as a lens that influences how the entire organisation works together.

Why I added it

Most agile frameworks focus on the development and delivery side of an organisation. They do that well, Scrum, SAFe, and similar models bring structure, focus, and rhythm to teams that build and deliver value.

But an operating model, in my view, should describe how the whole organisation works as one system.

That means not just development, but also governance, portfolio management, funding, leadership, and the way decisions are made.

If only one part of the system adopts a new way of working while the rest stays traditional, the result is tension; two worlds, two rhythms, and no clear alignment.

I’ve seen this many times: teams proudly working in Scrum with a Product Owner and sprints, while the rest of the organisation still runs on projects, annual budgets, and milestone-driven steering.

The Product Owner ends up acting as a project manager in disguise, constantly translating between two incompatible worlds.

Why Product Thinking helps

Product Thinking provides a common language and a unifying concept.

It shifts the focus from temporary projects to continuous value delivery.

Products, whether digital or not, become the stable units of value, ownership, funding, and learning.

In a truly product-oriented organisation,

• funding flows to products, not projects,

• teams stay together long enough to own outcomes, not just deliverables,

• and governance measures value and flow, not effort and output.

That’s why Product Thinking belongs inside the operating model.

It connects development and delivery with governance, portfolio management, and leadership. It aligns the full system instead of just one part.

What inspired me

I was strongly inspired by Mik Kersten’s book Project to Product and his talks about the Flow Framework.

His ideas helped me see that Product Thinking isn’t just about agile delivery; it’s about transforming the way organisations define, fund, and manage work.

It’s the bridge between strategy and execution and that bridge needs to be part of the operating model.

Final thought

An operating model should bring coherence, not conflict.

By integrating Product Thinking as a supporting concept, I hope to help organisations move from fragmented approaches to a shared vision of value creation — where every part of the organisation plays to the same rhythm.

“When you manage work as products instead of projects, you align the organisation around outcomes, not activities.”

We always welcome your experiences and feedback.