Is it hard to focus your software delivery organization on the right things? Do you sometimes deliver the wrong features or give too little priority to the most important features? Are you drowning in the cost of too much redundant software, because stakeholders can’t get on one page about what the business really needs? Do you struggle to make the case for investments you know are essential to your long-term survival but that deliver few short-term benefits? If so, consider the benefits of running your shop more like a business by reorganizing to deliver products (or value streams, in Lean lingo).

It’s been more than two years since we last surveyed software delivery leaders about their increasing tendency to organize to deliver software as products (rather than projects or application functional areas), but even then this trend was well under way:

I have only anecdotal evidence that this trend is continuing to grow, but I’m convinced by hundreds of interactions with top software delivery leaders since we did this survey that it is, especially for people who deliver customer-facing websites and mobile apps. Customer-facing dynamics are also driving this trend for the “Internet of things” among firms focused on Smart Grid and other similar domains that depend on customer adoption to drive success. What are the factors driving this growth?