Hello Reader,

Your operating model was supposed to make your team faster. So why is everything taking longer than you expected?

Every quarter, there's a roadmap review, an OKR calibration, a portfolio sync, a steering committee, a discovery readout, a strategic alignment session. Each one made sense individually when it was added. Together, they've turned every decision into a six-week negotiation across five forums.

That's the tipping point I want to talk about this month. The one nobody warns you about when you finally get your operating model "right."

Rigor turns into rigidity

Most product leaders I work with spend the first year of an operating model build celebrating every new artifact: a clean planning cadence, decision rights, governance forums, a Product Operating Model document that finally exists. The rigor feels earned, because it is.

The trap is what happens after. The structures keep doing what they're supposed to do, but they slowly stop adapting to the work. Discovery findings get translated into process-speak before they reach the people who need them.

Customer signals get averaged across templates until what's left is a flattened "theme" that nobody can act on. Decisions slowly become rituals. The dashboards stay green. The thing being lost, the speed at which your team can actually respond to what's real, is invisible until something forces the issue.

In Product Operations, Denise and I have a chapter called "Balance Process with Agility" for exactly this reason. The harder part is keeping the operating model elastic over time.

In this AI world where things change every minute, it’s more critical than ever to design that agility into your operating model.

Five warning signs your model has become a straitjacket

If you've been following the newsletter, you'll recognize this as the internal process trap I described before. The straitjacket is the diagnosis underneath that symptom.

The patterns I see most often in orgs that have crossed the line:

A customer insight that contradicts last quarter's plan takes more than a month to reach the roadmap.
Discovery teams stop sharing raw findings and only present "themes" or "categories" because that's what the planning template accepts.
The same decision gets re-litigated in three different forums because no single one has the authority to close it.
People talk about "the operating model" the way other companies talk about "compliance," as a thing you work around to get something done.
Senior leaders quietly grant themselves exceptions because the model can't move fast enough for the work they actually need to do.

Any one of these on its own is okay. More than one of them together is the warning. All five and the operating model is running you.

How to loosen it without dismantling it

I get this question a lot from CPOs at this stage: do I need to start over?

Almost never. The infrastructure is still doing real work. What needs adjusting is how the team relates to it, and where customer signal sits inside the cadence.

A few specific moves I've seen work.

Open every quarterly review with three customer insights from the last 90 days that changed your mind about something, before anyone reports on delivery or OKRs. This single change tells the entire org what the model is for.

Give every product team explicit permission to bring "off-cycle" insights into the next portfolio sync. If a finding from week four matters, it doesn't wait until next quarter.

Audit which forums actually close decisions and which ones only translate them. The translation forums are where rigidity calcifies. Either give them decision authority or remove them.

None of these require restructuring. They're things you can put in place this quarter without redesigning the whole operating model.

The test that predicts the trap

The question I now ask every product leader I work with: can your operating model accommodate a customer insight that contradicts last quarter's plan within a week?

If the honest answer is no, you don't have an operating model. You have a calendar.

If you want to work through this in your own organization, Denise Tilles and I wrote Product Operations for exactly that, and the courses at Product Institute are a good place to build the skill with your team.

What's the last customer insight that changed your roadmap mid-quarter, and how long did it take to get from discovery to a decision?

Until next time,