There are lots of ways of organising a digital or technology capability, and I’ve tried many of them. Most of them don’t work, resulting in slow, bureaucratic organisations which fail to  realise the full potential of technology. However, over time, through difficult lessons learnt in many different places, I have come to believe that there are five ingredients of a successful technology organisation. They all begin with the letter P, so let’s call this the 5 Ps model. It can be described something like this:

Platforms are highly homogenous, standardised, software-defined technology capabilities which enable products to be built at speed, with confidence that they will scale and be reliable and secure.

Products are highly specialised functional capabilities which deliver value to end users.

People are people! But the talent and capabilities of the people who do these jobs matter, as does the level of trust and autonomy they are afforded. In this model, people are expected to to be trusted experts with the power to manage, develop and continuously improve their products and platforms.

Practices are common ways of working which unite people who are otherwise distributed into autonomous platform and product teams. They are at least as much cultural as they are formal, and are driven by the pride and experience of expert professionals.

Performance comprises a set of meaningful metrics which describe the success of platform and product teams, and which are owned and driven by those platform and product teams.