The change
Continuity for the team. Choices for leaders.
Project funding asks an organization to commit to a solution before it has learned much about the problem. Each new feature then becomes another negotiation over scope, resources, and approval. The people doing the work may be assembled and reassigned repeatedly.
Fund a persistent value stream against outcomes instead. The team has continuity to understand the customer problem and improve the product, while leaders retain the ability to decide which scopes deserve capacity and whether the investment is producing useful results.
Faster AI-assisted delivery makes a feature-by-feature funding process harder to sustain because leaders face more frequent funding decisions.
What changes in practice
Fund a clearly bounded scope.
Define the bounded part of the customer journey the team owns and the outcome it should improve. Make clear where its responsibility ends and another team’s begins.
Allocate capacity from strategy.
Use the importance of the value stream to guide the investment. Let the team decide which work is most likely to improve its agreed outcome.
Review the investment on evidence.
Set an annual capacity baseline and review allocation quarterly against strategy, cost, outcome trends, and health measures. A weak result can call for a different solution, more capability, or a narrower scope. Diagnose it before deciding to reduce or end the investment.
A practical example
Fund the Booking Team as its approach changes.
The Booking Team owns reservation and payment, with an objective to help more customers confirm their booking. Its first idea is to simplify the booking form. Research then shows that customers get stuck after a failed payment: they cannot tell whether to retry or whether their reservation is still held. A project budget tied to redesigning the form would make it harder to act on that evidence.
Funding the booking scope lets the team test clearer payment status and recovery options within its agreed capacity. It measures completed bookings alongside payment errors and support requests. Quarterly investment reviews examine cost, outcome trends, and these health measures. The solution changes within the same reservation-and-payment boundary, without a fresh project approval.
Funding in practice
Fund lasting teams. Keep financial accountability.
Product funding for ongoing technology teams
Delta Air Lines moved from project funding to product funding, with ongoing teams delivering successive improvements.
Business and technology worked together to define product portfolios and priorities, refining them as they learned. Examples included loyalty products and letting passengers select meals before their flight.
The funding change supported teams continuing to improve a product beyond a single project.
Local authority with a long profitability record
Decentralized funding also works outside technology, in one of the most heavily regulated industries.
Handelsbanken replaced annual budgets with decentralized branch decisions and resource requests as needs arose. Branch managers remained accountable for financial performance, with measures tied to the bank’s goals.
The bank achieved a higher return on equity than its peers in 46 of the 47 years to 2019.
In ZeroBlockers, fund the team’s bounded customer scope, let it adapt the solution as it learns, and review whether the investment is producing useful outcomes.