Over the last 10+ years we have seen a number of large enterprises experiencing (near) Kodak moment and struggling to drive growth as they navigate through long term disruption to their business. In this talk Sonja will share learnings from award winning innovation program at Pearson and will outline how principles and practices of Lean Product Lifecycle and active portfolio management can help companies navigate disruption, increase innovation and transform their portfolios and why mindset, leadership and cultural changes are key to success.

1. Transforming an Enterprise
Pearson Case Study
Sonja Kresojevic
Lean Startup Conference 2016
Learn Build
Measure

2. Disruptive Environment

3. Most likely outcome

4. Pearson’s challenge
• Unbalanced portfolio, lot’s of duplication
• Transition from print to digital
• Big bets
• Very little innovation or disruption = no growth
• Slow speed to market
• Complex decision making
• Customers involved too late
Annual
Plans
Big
Budgets
Complex
Systems

5. Five pillars of transformation
• Portfolio approach
• Lean Product Lifecycle
• Investment governance
• Best practice and behaviors
• Organizational culture change

6. Pearson continuous transformation journey..
PLC work initiated
PLC v1.0
launched
Incremental funding
agreed with Finance
PLC Coach
Program
launched
First early
adopters
PLC global
adoption
Portfolio tool
Active portfolio
management
PLC Roadshow
workshops
and training
First view of the
global portfolio
and Exec
endorsement
Product
taxonomy
v1.0

7. Disruption within..

8. Strong global community

9. Product Development redefined
Finance HR Legal Product Development Marketing Sales

10. Product Portfolio few years back..

11. Lean Product Lifecycle Framework
Idea
Explore
Validate
Grow
Sustain
Retire

12. RIGHT SIDE: Product-Market fit with a working
business model
Increase transparency of mature investments to
ensure alignment to strategy
LEFT SIDE: Validate assumptions and hypotheses
Reduces the risk of wasted investment and allows
teams to pivot to new and better ideas
Explore
Grow
Quarterly
Quarterly
Validate
Sustain
RetireIdea
<£50k
to Explore
<£250k
To Validate

13. Product Councils i.e. Investment boards

14. Core PLC Artifacts
Product Teams use the
templates to collate and
present evidence at
each stage.
Investment decision-makers
use and extend the
scorecards to grade the
evidence and make go/no-
go/pivot decisions.
Self starters use PLC playbook
as “how-to” guides providing
sufficient information to get
them up and running.

16. Transparency at Scale
Product
Data
Product Trends
(Actuals/Forecast)
Portfolio
Reporting
Historic
Record
of Decisions
Stage-Gate
criteria
$
Portfolio Tool

17. Key lessons
• Ensure leadership support
• Connect to business outcomes and show impact (everyone loves good KPIs)
• Don’t underestimate power of denial
• Get finance on board
• Power of data
• Build a small core team to drive transformation, use community and TTC to
scale
• Think big, start small
• Learn the language
• Don’t underestimate the scale of the effort
• Eat your own dog food
• Build strong communities to drive change and stay sane
• It’s a movement
• Invest in people
• Reward and incentivize right behaviors

18. Thank you!
Sonja.kresojevic@gmail.com
@sonjak18