Cut, Kill, Continue: Understanding Value at the Portfolio Level w/ Russ Pena

In this episode, we are joined by Enterprise Transformation Consultant, Russ Pena to talk about how to understand value at the portfolio level, and how an organization can establish a decisioning stack to help them make cut, kill, continue decisions. From there, we discuss how to use capability mapping to move past making “gut” based decisions and prioritize projects using a more scientific method. We closed our show sharing the need for organizations to develop an understanding of how much change they can have in process at once. If you’d like to reach Russ, you can contact him at [email protected] or via twitter at @russpena Show Notes: Welcome 2:00 Background on Russ and his work helping organizations build our product and portfolio teams 2:40 How an organization determines what value is, and how they make choices that align it with strategic goals 3:25 Determining Cut, Kill, Continue at the Portfolio Level 5:40 Leveraging Test Driven Development with Creating New Products 7:55 Time Constraints for New Product Experiments 8:50 Shifting the Perception of Success and Spoiling the Bed 9:55 Protecting Yourself from Bad Experiments by Assigning a “Watcher" 10:48 The importance of a Murder Board 12:28 The cultural impact of accountability 15:25 Clarity, Accountability and Showing Measurable Progress 17:16 Finding Evidence Evidence 18:27 The Hard Part of the Power of “No" 20:00 Building in the Decisioning Mechanism 20:34 Capability Mapping 23:34 Getting Past the Culture of Overly Optimistic Management 25:50 The Criticality of Trust, Understanding Capacity and Capability 28:10 The importance of a scientific approach to prioritization 32:00 Developing Innovation Within an Enterprise 34:08 Bringing Capability Mapping to Innovation 40:02 WIP limits for Organizational Change 43:44 Contacting Russ 46:39