**Constellations are greater than their sum of ‘North Stars’ - but only if you can ‘see’.**

Many organisations striving to adopt a product model allow product discovery to remain a function of the product team. The prevailing view is that each product team is responsible for understanding user needs, exploring opportunities, and shaping what gets built. While this makes sense on paper, and aligns with much of the product management canon, it quietly undermines the quality of product strategy and the coherence of the entire portfolio - the ‘constellation’ if you will.

The truth is that in complex organisations, high-quality product discovery cannot happen inside individual product teams alone. The knowledge and vision that should drive what products get built and how they evolve resides at a different level of abstraction — one that spans across products, not within them.

Each Product Vision is a Function of Product Strategy

A foundational mistake many organisations make is treating the product vision as something that emerges from within a single product team. The reality is that the vision and accountabilities for any specific product is a function of collective product strategy, which must sit outside of any one product.

A Product Vision is the answer to the question: What could we create that would most effectively deliver value within this domain?

But that question can only be answered when the domain itself — the ecosystem of users, internal business needs, and underlying business model — is properly understood.

Individual product teams, by definition, operate at a narrower scope. Their view is anchored in the boundaries of their own product. Even when they undertake robust research, they are limited by the framing of their own backlog and their own mandate. They might surface valuable insights, but those insights will always be coloured by the gravitational pull of the product they own.

Product strategy is about identifying the most valuable opportunities that will deliver on the organisation’s overarching strategy, and about how products and services can meet those opportunities. This requires a wider-angle lens. It involves exploring the intersections between products, internal processes, and the wider business landscape. This kind of thinking is rarely formalised or consistently resourced in most organisations. Often, the gap is filled with programme management which is only half the story.

Knowledge at the wrong place, is no knowledge at all

Even when individual product teams surface great new discovery knowledge, that knowledge tends to become practically and politically trapped within that product team.

Imagine a team working on a customer service tool. Through deep discovery work, they uncover that the real value opportunity lies not in improving the tool itself, but in rethinking how customer data flows across sales, onboarding, and support processes. That insight is profoundly important — but the team’s remit is to deliver improvements to the customer service tool. They have neither the mandate nor the political capital to shape a cross-cutting product vision.

Without a formal mechanism to lift these insights into a shared strategic conversation, the knowledge gets buried in Jira tickets, retro slides, and Confluence pages. The opportunity never becomes actionable at the level where it really matters.

Why is there a gap here?

The absence of ongoing, portfolio-level discovery and design work is not a mistake — it’s a reflection of how organisations view this space.

Most organisations have well-established mechanisms for managing delivery across multiple products. Programme management functions, delivery portfolios, or high level strategic initiatives provide governance and oversight. But these structures overwhelmingly see the world through the lens of delivery — schedules, budgets, and scope.

They do not see discovery (of portfolio level opportunities) as an ongoing responsibility in its own right, nor do they have the skills to take that role on. Let alone to consider this kind of discovery work as something that happens before work is assigned.

At this level of in the organisation, everything still looks like a ‘project’.

The space between products is treated as a programme management problem, where the goal is to coordinate delivery rather than generate interconnected value across the portfolio.

This leaves a dangerous blind spot. Richness and complexity go unexplored at this level. Without dedicated effort, the organisation’s product portfolio becomes a patchwork of individual products, each optimised in isolation but misaligned as a whole. It will be virtually impossible to support the organisations’ real value streams if left this way.

Another key reason this gap persists is the way organisations think about teams. Good practice says to bring established teams to the work, but we don’t even know what ‘the work’ looks like yet. It’s a chicken-egg problem - do we define the work first then build a team, or assign a persistent team and the work will emerge. I think you can tell I am a fan of the latter.

In very practical terms if an opportunity is identified that spans multiple products, the organisation will struggle to resource the work because everyone is already assigned to lower level delivery teams. Managers are reluctant to hire for uncertain opportunities, even if the potential upside is huge. Tricky.

What Good Looks Like

Every context and every organisation is different, so there will be many ways to get to an outcome that works for you. The important thing is to focus on a few key principles that will literally and figuratively elevate your discovery practice.

Quick-ish Fixes

Articulate the Portfolio Vision

The Enterprise Portfolio Vision expresses the overall value proposition of the portfolio including how it will be realised in specific products.

Articulating the value of the entire portfolio as a single statement provides a north star for discovery and delivery alike. This vision should not be a list of products or projects, but a clear articulation of how the portfolio as a whole is intended to create value for customers, users, and the business. This provides a single minded articulation of value that ensures all decisions made about products and services within it, are aligned to the right outcomes. It also makes it easier to spot duplicative efforts, misaligned investments, or missing capabilities across product teams. When the vision is explicit, teams can anchor their own product-level discovery work in a shared understanding of the broader strategic intent.

Service Blueprint with Value Streams

A Service Blueprint provides a cross-section on how the business delivers value, with the addition of value streams to help guide multi-product decisions.

A Service Blueprint provides a company wide view of how value flows to customers across different touchpoints and internal systems. This artefact maps not only the user journey but the behind-the-scenes processes, systems, and products that contribute to the experience. The act of creating this blueprint forces the organisation to confront how disconnected or siloed its products are in delivering value. It highlights gaps, overlaps, and dependencies that would otherwise remain invisible. The blueprint becomes a shared frame of reference for both product and business stakeholders, shifting the focus from isolated optimisations to holistic service outcomes. One critical addition to a ‘standard’ service blueprint is to include the key value streams (how we make money) in the business so that it becomes clear how our portfolio of products and services supports them (or don’t).

Value Tree to Connect Outcomes, Opportunities, and Capabilities

A Value Tree articulates relationships vertically and horizontally simultaneously, allowing relationships to be understood beyond the boundaries of individual products and services.

A Value Tree breaks down strategic business outcomes into progressively more granular opportunities, ultimately linking them to specific product capabilities. Unlike a traditional backlog or roadmap, the Value Tree is not product-centric — it is value-centric. This structure makes the relationship between strategic objectives and delivery efforts more explicit. It allows organisations to see how individual product investments contribute to shared goals, and where the most promising opportunities lie — especially if they don't fit neatly into existing product mandates. When maintained as a shared artefact, the Value Tree creates a common language for discussing value across teams and business units. A Value Tree specifically allows product teams to elevate opportunities to the portfolio level because the opportunity spans multiple products and services.

Portfolio-Level Prioritisation Framework

Strategic Prioritisation of Opportunities is less about effort, and more about complexity of the space.

Prioritisation at the portfolio level requires a different lens than at the product level. A strategic prioritisation framework — such as a quadrant balancing strategic value against implementation complexity — helps identify which opportunities are most worth exploring across the portfolio. This is distinct from delivery prioritisation, which typically weighs effort against ‘value’. The portfolio prioritisation process ensures that discovery resources are focused on the opportunities with the greatest potential to unlock strategic value, rather than just the next incremental improvement within existing products.

These approaches are uncommon in organisations. If unsure, engage an external consultant to maximise team outcomes. Alternatively, hire an internal facilitator—contractor or permanent—to own and drive the process.

Taking it further: Establish a Value-Focused Planning Cadence

Having the above artefacts in place can help start important conversations but to keep this approach going and ensure they lead to achieving outcomes, you need to embed a value-focused planning cadence into your governance processes.

Instead of relying solely on programme steering committees or delivery roadmaps, create regular portfolio-level sessions where the primary goal is to explore the interconnected value amongst all products and services - ultimately understanding them as a system. These sessions should:

Take the company strategy into account
Surface and discuss principles or policy laid out by technology leadership
Discuss the vision and guiding principles for the portfolio as a whole, as created by the owner
Take input from product teams on what they’re learning on the ground
Surface strategic questions that span multiple products
Incorporate perspectives from internal business units working on values streams relevant to this portfolio
Prioritise opportunities for deeper discovery and concept exploration
Plot opportunities across Now, Next, Later horizons
Course-correct individual product strategies

Getting Really Serious: Assign a Portfolio Discovery Team

The best way to close this knowledge gap is to formalise a dedicated Portfolio Discovery Team — a small, cross-functional group with the mandate to continually explore the domain at the portfolio level. This also assumes you have a dedicated and accountable leader of the portfolio who can make decisions or influence where they cannot solely decide, advocate for the needs of the platform, and support this new team. Discovery work in the portfolio should happen in conjunction with, and alongside individual product discovery and definitely not very far ahead of time or the knowledge will decay or become irrelevant, and team buy-in will be very low.

This team would:

Define the Vision for the portfolio as a whole (responsibility of the owner)
Map the evolving value landscape across products and business units
Conduct user and stakeholder research at the intersections between products
Develop high-level concepts and prototypes that span multiple products and services in the portfolio to explore new opportunities
Feed prioritised opportunities into product teams or senior decision-making forums
Listen, distil, and refine insights from specific product discovery work.
Sense-check and course correct the portfolio to organisational strategy

This isn’t a delivery team — it’s a knowledge-creation team. Nor is it a team that will do detailed Product Discovery for a specific product, that should still be handled by the product team responsible for developing it. Its job, instead, is to make the whole system smarter over time. The work they produce becomes the connective tissue between the strategic vision of the organisation and the individual decisions made by product teams.

Risks

Implementing this approach can unlock significant strategic value, but it also introduces new risks that organisations must actively manage:

Loss of Clarity on Accountability: Establishing portfolio-level discovery could create ambiguity about who owns which decisions if roles and responsibilities are not carefully defined.
Dilution of Delivery Focus: Without clear boundaries, discovery work at the portfolio level could drift into solutionising or slow down delivery momentum.
Political Resistance: Appearing to shift the locus of discovery from product teams to a central function may be perceived as disempowering, especially in organisations that have invested heavily in autonomous product teams.
Sustained Investment Required: Portfolio discovery does not yield immediate delivery outputs, making it vulnerable to short-term budget pressures or leadership changes.
Fragmented Knowledge Systems: If insights are not consistently documented and shared, knowledge could still become trapped in pockets, undermining the very goal of the approach.

Proactively addressing these risks is essential to ensure that portfolio discovery strengthens — rather than weakens — the overall product model.

Recap

If product visions are the expression of product strategy, then product discovery needs to happen where strategy lives — across products, not just within them.

Leaving product discovery solely to product teams traps insight and imagination within narrow boundaries. But treating the space between products as a programme management exercise blinds the organisation to the richness of value that resides there.

By formalising portfolio-level discovery work — whether through value trees, planning cadences, or dedicated teams — organisations can unlock a higher level of strategic coherence and build products that serve users, business needs, and the wider system they operate within.

The challenge isn’t just to deliver better — it’s to see better.

This article is a continuation of the issues covered in this earlier piece “Implementing a Product Model in a Non-Product Organisation“