The Owner

Leading to Success of Product and Services

AME3 incorporates a leadership system, with the Owner being one of its three main forces. To illustrate the leadership role of the Owner, let’s examine two different companies.

The first is a nimble start-up with 20 employees, while the second, a well-established medium-sized Enterprise, employs 1200 people. Both use AME3 to navigate their unique challenges towards growth.

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Example: Start-up

Ownership is leadership with power

Our example start-up was founded a few years ago with a small Team. The founder, who is also the main shareholder, is integral to a Team of now 20 employees and continues to play a pivotal role in product development. Recently, he secured additional investment capital aimed at accelerating growth.

As the leading expert in the technical domain, the founder now faces the critical challenge of empowering his employees to reduce their reliance on his expertise. This transition is essential for him to shift his focus entirely to leading the business, thereby ensuring the company’s sustained growth.

The new product has the chance to dominate the global market, with immense opportunities and minimal competition. As the founder and co-owner, he is responsible for defining the Ambition and setting intermediate Goals for product development.

Within the context of AME3, our founder is the Owner, and his employees form the sole Arena of his Enterprise.

The work environment is highly complex, with constant initiation of new projects. This creative chaos can often lead to frustration without clear guidelines. The employees are demanding concrete direction to maintain focus. Our Owner must collaborate with the Teams to identify the most lucrative opportunities in the market. The Arena Product is teetering between the concept stage and custom build in its evolution.

The Teams are seeking answers to critical questions. For instance, how can they test new functionalities using straightforward experiments without significant investment in development?

Furthermore, architectural decisions made now will significantly influence the company’s growth, presenting both opportunities and risks that the Owner must manage meticulously.

Given the complexity of their work, the employees adopted Scrum from the outset and organized themselves into Teams following the Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) framework. An external System Lead was engaged by the Owner to facilitate this process. Since Scrum and LeSS are aligned on principles with AME3, this transition was seamless.

The group of co-owners and investors make up the Accountable Representatives. The business case presented by the Owner serves as the Ambition for the Arena and its Arena Product.

Example: Medium-sized Enterprise

In our medium-sized enterprise, the original founders have transitioned to the supervisory board, entrusting decision-making authority to a newly appointed CEO. Her primary objectives are to enhance profitability and drive innovation to stay competitive in a rapidly changing market.

To achieve these ambitious goals, the CEO plans to enhance the organization’s overall agility using the AME3 framework. Within AME3, the supervisory and management boards together constitute the Accountable Representatives.

The Arena Product is the result of all services, with the goal of maintaining and increasing value for the customer.

Assuming, that the Enterprise has just one Arena as in the example of the start-up. And we view the enterprises’ results as a single Enterprise Product. So we have to accept that the CEO is solely responsible for all investment and the overall success of it. We can recognize the CEO as the sole Owner or Enterprise Owner in terms of AME3.

Recognizing the impossibility of lead 1,200 employees alone, it is clear that the CEO plans to divide the product into sub-products, reorganize the company into distinct Arenas, and delegate her ownership responsibility. This aims to create a lean hierarchy, empowering each Arena to independently optimize its Arena Product.

However, this is all theoretical, and the organization is far from this ideal.

The current organizational structure emphasizes technical and functional specialization, where career progression and employee recognition are tightly woven into the hierarchical system. This has led to a leadership model focused on maximizing work efficiency through specialized roles and cost reduction. Consequently, the multi-layered decision-making process is sluggish, impeding the organization’s responsiveness to rapid market changes.

Moreover, the existing line management has resulted in conflicting objectives. For instance, the head of prodcut management prioritizes sales growth by demanding new features, while production and operations focus on reliability. This is creating tension between the departments. This model inherently resists innovation, clinging to the status quo.

The previous CEO introduced project management to boost innovation across functional barriers. However, this created additional management roles with conflicting goals, worsening the problems.

The diminishing number of value-creation experts, overwhelmed by an average of 4–5 projects each, are increasingly frustrated, leading to burnout and high turnover. This problem is starkly reflected in a portfolio of over 120 active projects, most showing little or no progress.

Recognizing the urgency, the new Owner is striving to significantly trim the number of projects. This task is challenging, as many projects have broad scopes and encompass both high value and high risk.

Collaborating with the Accountable Representatives, including experienced managers and Team experts, the CEO initiates a strategic refinement process using Wardley Mapping. This method helps identify necessary improvements in Products and services, alongside required changes in the organization. Critical objectives from the project portfolio are integrated into this strategy too and added as Goals to the Enterprise Arena Backlog.

This process also identified potential new Arenas and their potential Owners. Some of these Arenas already exist as organizational units, while others need to be created by reorganization. All these changes are innovation Goals too and are added to the new Enterprise Arena Backlog.

To outline his strategic plan, the CEO ordered the Goals into the Enterprise Backlog and pulled together with the workgroup a very limited number of Goals into focus.

An external expert in organizational design facilitates this entire process, introducing and implementing the necessary methodologies, including a Kanban system, to manage the Enterprise Backlog and Goals. Later, he will take over the responsibility of the Enterprise System Lead.

Rules

AME3 establishes rules that foster the development and flourishing of the leadership system. Here are the rules connected with the Owner and Enterprise Owner:

Owner

Enterprise Owner

Conclusion

In both scenarios, the Owners leads to the success of products and services. They serve the Enterprise by:

  1. Balancing opportunities and risks.
  2. Focusing the organization.
  3. Ensuring decisions are made.

AME3 empowers them to make informed decisions and delegate effectively, fostering an adaptable culture and continuous improvement.