Delivery Transformation: Reduced Cycle Times
Principal Product Coach·Delivery Leadership, Kaiser Permanente·2023 - 2024
HealthcareDelivery TransformationPlatform / InfraProduct Strategy
LOVE the energy and absolutely LOVED your approach to distill down the priorities for this workstream. Thank you so much for everything, Kate - we are killing it !!!! You are a great coach.
The impact
12 weeks cut from one portfolio's delivery cycle, traced to blockers value stream mapping surfaced. 70+ teams coached across 9 portfolios. 300+ product org members aligned on roadmaps, roles, and rituals. Rated "Excellent" by leadership and called "a visionary and a person of action."
I co-led Kaiser Permanente's Delivery Practice Improvements (DPI) initiative across a $350M digital portfolio. The work was not "make teams faster." It was to find out where the time was actually going, because nobody could, and then build the fix so it scaled past me.
You cannot fix what you cannot see
Teams at Kaiser were moving, but not always in the right direction. Delivery maturity ranged from PMO-style waterfall to modern agile, and there was no centralized view of where cycle time was being lost or why. Worse, squads, executives, and stakeholders meant different things by "value," so prioritization was guesswork dressed as strategy and roadmaps drifted out of alignment.
The trap here is to start prescribing, more standups, more agile, more process, against a problem no one has measured. So I went after the measurement gap first. I helped create shared OKRs to unify coaching and metrics across delivery orgs, embedded product coaches into squads, and ran a monthly experiment calendar to test process changes with minimal friction. The discipline that made it real was validating every improvement against data, not perception.
The blockers were hiding in plain sight
Value stream mapping surfaced what everyone had felt but no dashboard had ever shown: last-minute ADA compliance requirements creating rework cycles, dependency underestimation derailing sprint forecasts, and backlog quality issues slowing everything downstream. None of these were visible as cycle-time line items until the map made them one.
I built KPI dashboards that made lead time, completion rate, and forecast accuracy visible to leadership and squads alike, then facilitated squad-level sessions to turn the data into action. One portfolio used its value stream mapping findings to cut 12 weeks from its delivery cycle. The leverage move was the next step: I codified the work into playbooks, toolkits, and narratives so coaches could run it across 9 portfolios without me in the room, because a transformation that needs its consultant present is not a transformation, it is a dependency.
What this built
- A delivery improvement system that scaled without me. Playbooks, dashboards, and experiment templates coaches could run independently across dozens of teams.
- Visibility into the blockers that matter. ADA rework, dependency drift, and backlog quality stopped being abstract complaints and became data with owners and paths to improvement.
- A shared language for delivery health across a $350M portfolio. OKR alignment, outcome-based metrics, and consistent coaching gave squads and executives one frame for evaluating progress.
What people said about this work
JenniferDesign & Strategy Director, Kaiser Permanente“Kate is AMAZING. Her energy, the structure she brings to discussions, the way she deals with difficult conversations.”
RichExecutive Director, Delivery, Kaiser Permanente“Kate has amazing ideas, is very creative, and highly productive. She brings a lot of great energy, thinking, and leadership to our Delivery practice and is helping me establish and run an effective system for continuous improvement and upleveling our Delivery practices.”
PeteProduct Portfolio Director, Kaiser Permanente“THANK YOU Kate! You've been a great partner: You challenged me in ways I needed to expand my thinking, you're overflowing with good ideas, and your enthusiasm kept us going. I appreciate how you take notes to visualize ideas and keep work moving forward. Your energy is contagious and makes it a joy to work with you. Let's keep collaborating to curve the organization closer to the crystal-clear product model vision you convey.”
JenProduct Management Leader, Kaiser Permanente“Thank you for being so creative, proactive, and thoughtful about how we get results every day. You're crushing it in the "get *^%# done" department! Admiration props and gratitude. Thank you for diving into work with such energy and drive - you're developing a reputation as someone who can execute within moments of being thrown into complex situations, and it's incredible to see.”
JayDigital Transformation Coach, Kaiser Permanente“Kate has a strong bias for action. She initiates helpful activities and sees them through, like producing interactive Product Workshops to help teams deliver more value quickly. Kate's willing to speak up about problems she sees and engage her teammates in developing solutions. She's one of the most consistently motivated and energetic people I've worked with.”
Product ExecutivesProduct Leadership, Kaiser Permanente“FANTASTIC session and awesome presentation. Great job. I love your product campfire - more please.”
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