Hi Peter,
It’s great that you have open sourced this and thank you for the opportunity to contribute my thoughts based on my experience of LPM.
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Firstly, I agree that perhaps there is a better name. Product Portfolio Management perhaps.
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I dislike the phrase align strategy with delivery or strategy with execution. In reinforces thinking at the top and doing at the bottom. Strategies exist at all levels within the organisation from personal development strategies to organisational strategies. For me LPM is about providing the context and details of the higher level strategies to Product Teams so that they can make the best possible decisions.
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I would also say that LPM has a large role in setting the right conditions for Product Teams to be successful. If we use a garden analogy, it’s less about measuring the height of your seedlings and measuring the weight of your veggies, it’s about ensuring the garden is watered, weeded, and the soil is managed. Product Managers are accountable for the decisions they make. LPM is accountable for the environment in which they work. Do they have the right funding, people, information, policy, guardrails etc to be able to make decisions and move forward?
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But having said that, yes LPM is also about collating information for senior management to inform their choices/strategies so, where the Products don’t have automatically generating KPIs, there will always be an element of LPM asking for reporting information.
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I like the way that you contrast LPM with traditional approaches. Based on what I’ve described, I would encourage you to go further. I would also really emphasise the shift from Projects to Products and Services. Most people seem to agree that there will always be a need for Projects, but I think Projects in the organisations I work in are cross Product initiatives which require coordination. It’s rare that it makes sense to spin up a temporary team for a fixed scope of work and then disband them afterwards.
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I confess, I’ve not read all the material yet and I will endeavour to comment on as much as I can, but for this section, I would perhaps try to write it for the exec, so make it shorter and punchier, moving some of the detail into other sections.
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Questions I am frequently asked in training include, when should I use LPM? Is it right for my organisational context? At what level in the organisation does it sit? If we have multiple portfolio’s, how do you define the boundaries? How many Value Streams/Products/People do you need to consider having a Portfolio? I think answers to these more practical questions that I imagine you have opinions on based on your collective experience would be a valuable addition, would give you credibility, be an interesting data set for debate, and offers rules of thumb which are, to my knowledge, not available in other frameworks.