---
title: Persistent product teams replace project teams; rolling investment replaces annual budgets
pageKind: stance
status: published
abstract: Projects are time-bound and optimise for delivery deadlines rather than long-term sustainability. The fix is teams that persist with the product and money that flows where outcomes accrue.
sources:
  - articles/why-product-centric-approach-needed
  - articles/why-product-centricity-critical
---

## The position

Replace project teams with **persistent teams that own a `[[entities/digital-product]]` across its full lifecycle**. Replace annual project budgets with **rolling investment** in those products. Measure by business outcomes, not by project completion or service uptime.

Projects end. Products don&#39;t. The mismatch between bounded funding and unbounded ownership is where most IT-vs-business friction lives.

## Why

Projects are time-bound. They optimise for delivery deadlines rather than long-term sustainability. The team disbands at go-live, ownership scatters, the product enters a "maintenance" phase that nobody is accountable for, technical debt compounds, and three years later someone proposes a "modernisation project" that&#39;s really a do-over.

The persistent-team model breaks the cycle. Teams that own a product across its lifecycle care about its evolvability, not just its delivery. They make architectural decisions with the second decade in mind. They turn down feature scope that would compound debt.

Funding follows. If teams persist, money has to too — annual budget gates fight the very stability the team is set up to provide. Rolling investment that flows with the product, tied to outcome measures, is the operating-model corollary.

DPROM (2025, co-authored with Dan Warfield, Dave Lounsbury, John Spirko, David Mosko) formalises this — explicitly built around the Inverse Conway Maneuver. The org shape produces the architecture; design the org to produce the architecture you want.

## When this applies

- Any IT capability you intend to run for more than one funding cycle.
- Strategic investments where outcomes are uncertain at the start.
- Any product where evolvability matters more than predictability.

## When it doesn&#39;t

- Genuinely time-bounded one-time work — a migration with a clean end-date, a regulatory compliance project that retires after audit. Don&#39;t force these into product shape; project shape is correct for them.
- Pilot work that&#39;s explicitly throwaway. Persistent teams are an investment; pilots are an option.

## Heuristics derived from this stance

- `[[heuristics/contextualize-before-transforming]]` — adopt persistent teams against the current operating model, not in place of it.

## See also

- Parent stance: `[[stances/digital-product-is-the-unit-of-organization]]`
- Entity: `[[entities/digital-product]]`
