Working in a large enterprise, I've watched product teams embrace modern practices: DevOps, agile methodologies, customer-centric thinking. Yet despite these improvements, something fundamental is missing at times. Features still take months to deliver. Simple changes require coordination across a dozen teams. Developers spend more time in meetings than writing code.
Recently, while reading Mik Kersten's "Project to Product," I realized what we're experiencing isn't a technology problem. It's a value stream problem. The way enterprises organize work fundamentally conflicts with how value flows from idea to customer.
The Real Problem: Organizational Misalignment
Kersten's research revealed a sobering truth: developers spend more time navigating context than writing code. This isn't about bad tools or lacking skills. It's about how work itself is organized.
Flow Framework - Value Stream Visualization
Most enterprises organize around functional expertise: separate teams for development, QA, platform engineering, and security. But customer value flows horizontally across these functions. Every handoff creates friction, context loss, and delay.
As organizations grow, this problem compounds exponentially. What works for a startup becomes a nightmare at enterprise scale.
The Modern Enterprise Paradox
Product teams now iterate in two-week sprints while security teams operate on quarterly cycles. Platform engineering delivers on six-month roadmaps while product teams need infrastructure changes weekly. Each function optimizes for its own metrics, creating systemic bottlenecks no individual team can solve.
Consider a typical product team owning the "checkout experience." They control the code and user interface, but still depend on platform teams for infrastructure, security teams for compliance, and legal teams for regulatory approval. When these functions operate on different timelines, the product team's velocity gets constrained by the slowest dependency.
Three Symptoms Every Enterprise Recognizes
Late Discovery: A product team builds for three sprints, only to discover their feature violates a security policy during final review. Weeks of rework that could have been avoided with early collaboration.
Innovation Paralysis: Teams identify game-changing technology, but platform teams can't support it for six months. Innovation dies waiting for bureaucracy.
Information Islands: Regulatory changes get communicated through quarterly emails instead of being integrated into workflows. Teams discover conflicts during deployment, not planning.
The Path Forward: What Actually Works
The most successful enterprises don't eliminate supporting functions. They transform them:
Embed Expertise: Put security engineers directly on product teams. They become part of development, not external reviewers.
Share Success Metrics: Measure platform teams by how well they enable product velocity, not just uptime. When everyone shares accountability for delivery, behaviors change.
Create Self-Service Platforms: The best supporting teams operate like internal product teams, providing tools and interfaces that match the pace of product development.
Where to Start Tomorrow
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Pick one product team and one platform team. Give them the same success metric. Watch how quickly they start solving each other's problems.
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Embed one expert. Put a security engineer on your highest-priority product team. No more end-of-sprint surprises.
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Make the invisible visible. Start measuring how long work actually takes from idea to production. The bottlenecks will shock you.
The Bottom Line
The value stream challenge isn't going away. Organizations keep adding teams, tools, and processes without addressing the fundamental misalignment between how work is organized and how value flows.
But here's the opportunity: while your competitors struggle with delivery paralysis, you can be shipping features that matter. The solution isn't more technology. It's the courage to reorganize around how value actually flows.
The enterprises that figure this out will have faster innovation cycles and customers who notice the difference. The question is whether yours will be one of them.
What value stream disconnects are killing productivity in your organization? I'd love to hear your experiences.