Turning strategy into coordinated action
Closing the gap between long-term strategy and day-to-day execution, significantly improving alignment, planning and coordination across teams.
Expertise provided
Problem discovery & analysis
User research
Operating model design
Portfolio product strategy
Flight levels coaching
Timeline
15
The challenge
Like many broadcast networks globally, the ABC is navigating a structural shift in audience behaviour. Traditional broadcast consumption continues to decline as audiences move toward digital, on-demand and social platforms - in a landscape shaped by short-form content and global streaming competitors.
The ABC has invested heavily in growing its digital product organisation to respond to this shift. Cross-functional teams are empowered, outcome-focused and committed to accelerating digital growth.
As the organisation scales, however, a new challenge has emerged:
- Strategy is clear at a high level - grow digital fast enough to offset broadcast decline, but harder to translate into coordinated action across ~20 teams.
- Multiple priorities compete for limited capacity.
- Cross-team dependencies slow momentum.
- There isn’t yet a consistent mechanism to align the entire digital portfolio around a focused set of outcomes.
To meet an ongoing market shift, ABC Digital needs reliable ways to focus, prioritise and coordinate - so the organisation can move as one toward its most critical digital growth bets, without losing their team's sense of agency and innovation.
The turnaround
The first step was diagnosis - understanding how strategy, prioritisation and decision-making actually flowed across the digital organisation. Through interviews, workshops and portfolio mapping, we surfaced where work accumulated, where decisions stalled, and where strategic intent blurred into competing initiatives.
From there, we focused on building reliable alignment & delivery mechanisms:
Translating growth targets into Strategic Bets
ABC’s ambition to grow digital fast enough to offset broadcast decline was clear — but broad. We worked with leadership to translate that intent into a focused set of explicit, prioritised Strategic Bets: measurable, time-bound commitments the organisation could rally around and make trade-offs against.
Improving cross-team alignment & coordination
As scale increased, dependencies and competing priorities created friction. We introduced lightweight portfolio visualisation, dependency mapping, capacity visibility and regular coordination syncs to make cross-team work explicit.
This allowed leaders and teams to surface trade-offs early, reduce duplication, and align effort around the most important bets.
Clarifying team-level priorities and capacity
At the team level, tension existed between maintenance work, roadmap commitments and strategic initiatives. We clarified how team capacity was allocated across these categories, introduced portfolio-level WIP awareness, and made trade-offs visible.
This gave teams clearer focus - and leadership greater confidence that strategic work was progressing without burning out delivery capacity.
Instead of rolling out a new operating model, we iteratively evolved existing practices across these three levels. The result is a more coherent, transparent system for aligning the digital organisation around its most critical growth priorities - while preserving team autonomy and outcome focus.
Project results
We measured progress through quarterly surveys that assessed both organisational effectiveness and leadership sentiment. Gains were strongest in cross-team collaboration and alignment to prioritised work, supported by sustainability improvements such as introducing WIP limits and clearer prioritisation policies for maintenance and capacity planning.
Org-wide improvements:
- Cross-team collaboration: +13%
- Planning and dependencies: +9%
- Visibility of incremental progress: +9%
- Shared understanding of goals: +8%
- Sustainable pace: +7%
Leadership sentiment:
- Balance between maintenance and strategic work: +50%
- Confidence teams were working on the right things at the right time: +40%
- LT removing obstacles and minimising distractions: +22%
“We have a clear and consistent approach to delivery on our most strategically important work.”
And a clear, repeatable cadence for how we strategically prioritise and plan our work. Teams are better at saying no and planning to capacity, it is appreciated.
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