Operating Model Clarity: What High-Functioning Tech Orgs Get Right
Every organization has an operating model, clearly defined or not.
Most are running on something patched together over decades: Part institutional knowledge, part legacy process, part new technologies slapped onto old ways of working. This is dangerous because it leads to tech debt and, ultimately, Operating Model Debt: the compounding cost of continuing to run your business on outdated structures that weren’t designed for speed, customer connection, or measurable business impact.
And this debt is expensive.
It costs clarity. It costs agility. It costs you progress.
We know you’re tired of the friction, the fiefdoms, and the endless reorganizing that never quite sticks. We know you’re frustrated with the investments in tech that haven’t resulted in the ROI you expected, or the speed and efficiency promised.
The way forward isn’t another sexy tool or program. It’s a deliberate, capability-aligned, customer-connected way of working designed to deliver outcomes for your ideal customers.
It’s Operating Model Clarity.
And the journey toward clarity is what’s standing between where your org is right now and where you want it to be.
But the work doesn’t end there. Even when you achieve clarity, efforts to mature your organization never really stop. That’s because you will never finish recommitting to how your company operates—you will only expand it as complexity expands.
This is not failure. This is what it means to maintain maturity.
Let’s discuss why Operating Model Clarity is a precursor to maturing your organization, and how to maintain that maturity once you’ve crossed the clarity bridge.
This is where the journey starts.
Operating Model Clarity 101
Operating Model Clarity is a redesign in how your organization is led, how decisions get made, and how outcomes are delivered to customers.
With Operating Model Clarity:
Teams own outcomes, not outputs
Business and IT speak the same language and play the same game
Value flows through the organization continuously
Everyone can feel and measure progress
Let’s be clear: an operating model isn’t Agile. It’s not Six Sigma. It’s not a diagram on a consulting slide.
It’s your company’s muscle memory. It’s the invisible logic behind how work gets done across every function. Not just how it’s tracked, or who owns what, but how goals become roadmaps, and how roadmaps become real.
It’s how decisions get made, how priorities are set, how teams are formed, funded, and held accountable. It's your organizational infrastructure, whether you've clearly articulated it or not.
It’s about declaring: This is our model. This is how we work.
It’s how your organization answers the big questions:
Who decides what we work on?
How do those decisions get funded?
What does “done” mean?
How do we staff and structure teams?
What happens when priorities shift?
And more importantly: does everyone—from the C-suite to the delivery team—answer these questions the same way?
In many companies, the answer is a resounding no.
The Four Dimensions of Operating Model Maturity
Achieving Operating Model Clarity starts with an evaluation: What’s the current reality of the org vs the desired state, and what does the gap between the two mean for you?
There are four specific dimensions of maturity that are interconnected and can neither be matured sequentially nor in isolation. In fact, no one area can fall too far behind the others without creating a serious drag on those further out ahead.
Here, we’ll use the Tuckpoint Operating Model Maturity Model to help you identify both the strengths and the gaps your org needs to address in order to achieve clarity and, ultimately, maturity.
1. Leadership
The first dimension, leadership, refers to both a position and a mindset in an Operating Model.
Positionally, achieving Operating Model Clarity requires active commitment from the C-Suite through senior and mid-level management, all the way down to each individual contributor. No part of the organization can opt out of involvement.
This work typically starts in the C-Suite, usually within the technology organization, but it can’t end there. It's normal for experimentation to start this way, but an enthusiastic CEO and business line partnerships are required for the model to thrive in the long run.
Mindset, on the other hand, requires an enterprise-wide commitment to customer focus, servant leadership, and a collective sense of ownership of both problems and solutions. Change champions and early adopters are crucial to seeding new ideas about the Operating Model and the opportunities it brings.
An organization struggling with this dimension might show symptoms like:
Priorities are constantly shifting
Strategy communicated from the top is not understood or embraced at lower levels
Leaders are frustrated with the speed of getting things done (it’s slow, uneven, or unpredictable)
Command/control is pervasive
"What did I get for my investment?" is opaque
2. Ecosystems
Ecosystems refer to the visible and invisible structures inside an organization. The easiest to identify are the written-down structures, such as org charts, business units, P&Ls, and resource pools.
Invisible ecosystems, like team behaviors, functional silos, and cross-functional teams, are equally crucial for the positive and negative impacts they can have on enabling change.
Here, you’ll typically see culture emerge as the primary obstacle to success, so change management is a critical leadership consideration as you embark on the work ahead. New team organization and alignment are likely to fracture the established org structures as the Operating Model evolves, and this can be hard for the “this is how we’ve always done things” crowd to swallow. Being prepared for both active and passive detractors in the cultural space is crucial, allowing new ecosystems to experiment and flourish.
An organization struggling with this dimension might show symptoms like:
Functional silos with redundancy
Dependencies across teams that often slow/stop work
Teams create experiences that reflect the organization's structure, not the desired customer experience
Behaviors and stated culture are not aligned (e.g. lack of psychological safety, little room for experimentation)
3. Talent
No matter which technologies come along, people and teams will continue to be at the heart of the work, so how you organize around the tech needs to become nimbler. This dimension not only assesses who you have in roles and redefines the roles you fill, but also examines things like team size, topology, and skill alignment.
A common issue for organizations as they begin to rally around a singular Operating Model is consistent job descriptions, job families, and career pathing for new and specific roles.
Hiring new types of talent can be a challenging decision for companies because it’s not just about attracting new candidates, but also about upskilling hiring managers to manage skills they may be unfamiliar with.
An organization struggling with this dimension might show symptoms like:
Lack of clarity in roles and responsibilities
Work is tactical and reactive, lots of firefighting/heroic actions
Team members lack the authority to make decisions or to say "no" to work
4. Standards and Practices
Every organization needs standards and practices to define how work gets done. These are often the first to be challenged on the journey to Operating Model Clarity because people aren’t big fans of change or feeling vulnerable.
New ways of working won’t necessarily result in no standards or practices being implemented, but it can sometimes feel like chaos is the replacement for the comfort of the old bureaucratic ways. To navigate that, some standards and practices to focus on are governance models, playbooks, templates for artifacts like roadmaps and KPI reporting, documentation of systems, and automated tooling for planning and reporting.
This dimension is also the area that will typically need constant reinvention as the organization grows and matures. Additional layers of complexity, growth in size or market offerings, etc., will demand new structure in how work gets documented, organized, and shared. This is part of why we always say that there’s no such thing as “done” when it comes to transformation (but there sure as heck is such a thing as maturity!).
An organization struggling with this dimension might show symptoms like:
Prioritization and decision-making are based on the loudest voice/highest title
Repeatable processes or standard artifacts are abandoned under pressure, and often
There is little documentation, with most knowledge held in people's heads
If there is data, it's not trusted to base decisions on (or it's not easy enough to access to use consistently and reliably)
A Note About the Product Operating Model
We believe the most resilient, high-performing companies organize around a Product Operating Model: A structure that puts outcomes over outputs and drives cross-functional accountability from strategy to execution.
We love the saying “projects end, products endure” because it exposes the flaws in project-based mindsets. Scoped deliverables, neat timelines, and clean exits create an illusion of progress, but ignore what happens after the launch. A project hands you a thing. A product keeps solving a problem.
The Product Operating Model certainly isn’t the only one out there, so whether you’re straddling multiple operating models right now or haven’t yet made the leap to POp, know this: your organization is better off committing fully to any model than suffering from a lack of definition. Because when your organization can’t name how it works, chaos fills the void.
The Five Stages of Operating Model Maturity
A clear operating model does more than prevent dysfunction. It unlocks creativity, speeds delivery, reduces confusion, and re-anchors leadership in its most powerful role: not as fire-fighters, but as stewards of a system that helps people do their best work.
As you establish Operating Model Clarity, you’ll also begin the maturation journey. Think of it as a curve marked by five different stages, including:
Exploring
Emerging
Transforming
Scaling
Maturing
Let’s look at each stage along with markers for progress within each.
Stage 1: Exploring
The leadership team may be having initial conversations around shifting the organization’s operating model, or you may be looking for the right documentation to make a case for bringing this kind of change to your org.
This stage is characterized by:
Assessing the case for change
Exploring modern operating models & how others have adopted
Experimentation, with large variance in roles and approaches
Focus is on small-scale, opportunistic change
Stage 2: Emerging
Conversations are now occurring at higher levels in the organizations and, with some initial buy-in, teams are being given space to test and learn.
This stage is characterized by:
The case for change is made at highest level of org
“Our Op Model” is defined and a small team of champions is defined and activated
Pilot and small-scale teams are trying new ways of working based on what team members have seen/used elsewhere
A few outside hires are made but feel strong tension of “how we’ve always done it”
Stage 3: Transforming
This is probably the biggest stage of all in terms of the amount of work it takes to move through. Change is starting to catch on, with champions communicating the new ways of working more broadly across the organization. This is where ideas on paper start coming to life.
This stage is also a chasm, and some organizations never really cross it because cultural tensions and the gravitational pull of the old ways of working create swirl and impede progress.
This stage is characterized by:
The roadmap for transformation is socialized and understood
Teams are intentionally and carefully identified, trained and coached in the new model
Hiring starts to consider mindset and experience in working in similar models as an asset which accelerates adoption
Light governance models are tested to support cross team planning and collaboration
Stage 4: Scaling
It’s likely the org has experienced some growing pains to get to this point, but boy does the view from the top look good. The key here is not to rest on your laurels or take your foot off the gas. At this point, many organizations slip back into stage three because they’ve assumed the work is “done” (more on that shortly).
This stage is characterized by:
Company strategy is crisp and the org is clear on what is/is not priority work
The op model is well defined and understood at every level of the org
Internal communities of practice form to support peer-to-peer learning, which helps advance teams at scale but, if left unchecked, are likely to “snap back” to old ways of working without continuous pressure
Stage 5: Maturing
This is as complete as things will ever be. Constant recommitment to the work is still required amid changing market and consumer demands. However, the structures and processes in place now feel natural, leading to the speed and agility required to become a high-performing organization.
This stage is characterized by:
The operating model is considered a strategic differentiator
Culture has evolved to value outcomes over outputs
Talent is recruited, cultivated, and retained in alignment with operating model values
The Fallacy of “Done”
Another thing we love to reiterate about this journey is that it’s never done.
Not because transformation is hard (though it is). Not because people resist change (though they do). But because products don’t end, and neither do changing customer needs. You will never finish recommitting to how your company operates. You will only deepen it. Reaffirm it. Reinforce it. Expand it as complexity expands.
This is not failure. This is what it means to maintain maturity.
Your backlog of problems is also a backlog of opportunities—new customer needs, emerging technologies, shifting markets. Every quarter introduces new challenges and ideas. If your operating model can’t absorb that change and metabolize it, the organization will fall behind. Fast.
Projects end, but products endure. So if you’re structuring around fixed timelines, rigid deliverables, and brittle dependencies, you’re solving for a static reality in a dynamic market.
A mature operating model acknowledges this. It builds for adaptability. It assumes discovery will happen mid-flight. It prioritizes learning as part of delivery, not something you do “next time.”
And that’s why there’s no finish line. Just an ongoing commitment to clarity.
To stay mature, recommit visibly by:
Talking about the operating model often. Op Model literacy should be table stakes across roles, not insider knowledge reserved for ops or strategy leads.
Funding priorities in ways that match the model. Don’t say you’re product-led but fund in annual project cycles.
Modeling the model. Leadership behavior is the operating model. If you jump over processes, play favorites, or prioritize pet projects, you are writing new rules, whether you meant to or not.
What Clarity Feels Like
In an organization with Operating Model clarity, you’ll hear different kinds of conversations. People don’t ask, “Who’s responsible for this?” They already know. They don’t wonder how priorities were chosen—they can point to the decision-making structure that made it happen. And when new opportunities arise (because they always do), there’s a clear path to evaluate, size, and respond—not just react.
Here’s what we mean:
Priorities don’t whiplash from quarter to quarter. They build. They converge. The loudest voice doesn’t win—the clearest business case does.
The business knows how to work with tech. Not by submitting tickets, but by co-owning outcomes. There’s shared language, shared planning, shared accountability.
There’s less rework, fewer fire drills, and more real wins. Not because problems disappear, but because they’re surfaced early, sized accurately, and solved collaboratively.
It’s not about being perfect. It’s about being consistent.
But when you try sprinkling agile pixie dust on waterfall teams, you create the illusion of progress while reinforcing the legacy structures causing the stall (we call that Transformation Theater).
Strategic initiatives stall. Innovation teams are disconnected from core product delivery. Customer “insights” never reach engineering. Metrics blur. Innovation slows. And the backlog keeps growing.
Clarity is your way out.
Not clarity as control. Not clarity as compliance. But clarity as cohesion—the shared agreement about how your organization turns strategy into action, decisions into outcomes, and teams into high-performing engines of value.
The best organizations treat their operating model like product infrastructure. It’s maintained. It’s evolved. It’s versioned. It’s supported. And most importantly—it’s owned.
Every company is already running on an operating model. The only question is: did you design it, or did you default to it?