Client work
Fugue has worked with leadership teams in healthcare, financial services, automotive data, travel and consumer products, from Fortune 50 enterprises to specialist data companies.
Engagements by industry
Outcome Governed data quality, portfolio governance and shared services replaced project-by-project demand.
Operating companies ran dozens of enterprise resource planning systems, and the master, functional and transactional data that finance, supply chain, product and customer decisions depended on lived separately in each. Data was acquired project by project, through individual data lakes and point-to-point connections.
We led the enterprise architecture transformation and co-wrote the federated theory of operations with the client sponsor. Wardley value chain mapping placed each data capability, ingestion, master data, metadata, the data lake and machine learning, by its stage of evolution, and transition design set the sequence of change: the data domains to harmonize across twelve systems, the services each function would consume, a searchable data catalog, and the practices to stop and to start.
Governed data quality, enterprise portfolio governance and shared services replaced project-by-project demand.
Outcome The final design passed design validation and its summative human factors study, and went to the FDA, eight months after requirements writing began.
Close to four years and $300 million had gone into a connected medical device system, with its device, software, data and clinician portal, without a regulatory submission. The organization was matrixed by function and region, and quality and compliance ran as separate governance with their own teams.
We redesigned it as a product-driven organization: teaming structures, governance and policy across quality, regulatory and compliance, with customer journey mapping and jobs to be done to raise product management. New portfolio and product teams formed around the core product capabilities, with quality, medical, legal and regulatory inside each portfolio team, and the separate quality governance, the binding constraint, was integrated into the operating model with quality checks written into the exit criteria of the work.
Feature throughput rose. Eight months after the team began writing requirements, the final design had passed design validation and its summative human factors study, and the submission went to the Food and Drug Administration.
Outcome A four-tier delivery model and one three-year roadmap across three steering committees.
Technology, the enterprise program office and the business technology teams were organized differently across policy, underwriting, claims, billing and collections. A heavily customized core platform needed stabilizing, and demand came from three steering committees at once.
We redesigned structure, governance, process, vendor management and measures into a four-tier software delivery model, then the portfolio: team structures, roles, decision rights and measures for the core platform.
A three-year enterprise roadmap consolidated demand and set priorities across the three steering committees.
Outcome Both leadership teams committed to one real-time platform, and the bottlenecks the map exposed were removed.
A global banking group had acquired a regional bank and was combining it with the banks it already owned. Two executive leadership teams, each with its own systems and operating model, had to agree on one bank that kept its customers through the transition.
Over three days both executive leadership teams mapped the combined bank's systems, hand-offs and bottlenecks in kinesthetic models, worked through the futures the franchise might face, and decided which systems to retire and which to invest in to grow deposits, raise the credit quality of borrowers, and run on one real-time platform.
The two teams committed to one real-time platform to grow deposits and raise borrower credit quality, and removed the bottlenecks and hand-offs the map exposed.
Outcome One submission: five sequenced product bets, two deferred, a prototype before the largest capital.
The product roadmap and the capital plan had been written separately, six engineers supported every revenue-generating product, and the investment committee would read both documents.
Over twelve weeks and six working sessions the executive team wrote its aspiration, named the bottleneck that limited growth, generated four strategic alternatives on one page and checked each against the futures the market could produce. Between sessions we rebuilt the capital plan on the finance team's own model, so every product bet used the same discount rate, tax and timing conventions as the lines already funded.
Strategy and capital request went to the investment committee as one submission: five product bets sequenced so that no more than two reach market in a quarter, two deferred for failing the return bar, and a prototype with signed commercial terms before the largest capital is committed.
Outcome An operating model, a five-year roadmap on four tracks, and a funded data science capability.
The manufacturers who supplied the data were raising licensing fees and competing with the aftermarket the publisher served, new entrants were reaching the same information with artificial intelligence, and four product portfolio managers covered every product line with unclear decision rights between run and grow.
Over five months we facilitated a challenge-based strategy design with the executive team: a winning aspiration, the challenges framed as choices, options for where to compete and how to win, what would have to be true for each, Wardley value chain maps of the capabilities each required, and a strategy cascade for the insights business and for the content factory. The riskiest assumptions were checked cheaply: a request for proposal to ten data firms, and thirty days of repair data cleansed by hand and put in front of customers.
The team left with an operating model it could run and a 2024 to 2029 roadmap on four tracks, insights, the content factory, architecture, and portfolio and resource management, and leadership approved the budget for a data science capability.
Outcome One system of delivery, a reference architecture, and one delivery health scorecard.
Global technology was replacing project delivery with product delivery. Tooling was fragmented, roles were ambiguous, and each program had its own way of working.
We wrote the product playbook and its workbook as one system of delivery: team structure, roles, process, governance tiers, phase gates, ceremonies and metrics across the asset lifecycle, intake to decommissioning. One product runs on three teams with twenty-five roles and two hand-offs. Portfolio governance allocates investment on cost of delay and reviews each initiative quarterly for continue, change or kill. A risk framework and a maturity system measure the whole against predictability, transparency and sustainability, and a seven-module product management curriculum, assessed on the artifacts product managers already produce, teaches the roles the playbook names.
The first program through the pattern, a fleet-wide shipboard system, became the reference architecture. Later programs were reset into the same lifecycle, and leadership reads one delivery health scorecard across the portfolio.
Outcome A product-aligned reference architecture, a selected pilot, and expeditions sequenced across the authority.
The technology organization of a metropolitan transit authority had been consolidated from several agencies and still kept their functional silos, with no unified backlog, objectives or strategy, limited visibility of spend and of the value technology work created, and a large share of staff under labor agreements and civil service rules.
We designed the product-aligned transformation: an end-state reference architecture of product category, product line and delivery teams with the roles for each tier, a three-tier governance model with the decisions each tier makes, metrics on goal, question and metric for predictability, quality and early return, and orchestration rules for security, operations, legal and the other functions the teams do not own. Pilot candidates were scored against weighted criteria, the executive steering committee selected the recruitment and work assignment product line, and expeditions were mapped across workforce, transportation, customer and corporate categories with two roadmap forecasts.
The authority had a selected pilot of fifty to eighty people, a sequenced set of expeditions, a system of transformation with its steering committee, leadership team and transformation office, and a communications plan, with assessments on a regular cadence to inform roadmap decisions.
Outcome Seven pilots in six months; the first reached executive review in eight weeks.
The same organization wanted innovation offered as a service to every business function, with facilitation sized to each initiative.
We designed the five-stage innovation process, Engage, Experience, Experiment, Evaluate and Execute, with exit criteria for each stage, a catalog of more than twenty workshops and canvases (problem framing, stakeholder mapping, journey mapping, jobs to be done, experiment design, business value) and three service tiers. We ran the stage workshops and trained the core team to deliver the guided tier. A two-day design studio turned a request to replace a twenty-year-old shipboard property management system into a problem statement, five design drivers, four solution archetypes with their trade-offs, and a roadmap the executive sponsors committed to.
Within six months seven pilots had entered the pipeline. The first, a product strategy pilot for a shipboard payments system, reached executive review with a validated capital request in eight weeks, and the process became the primary delivery process in the product playbook.
Outcome A three-tier portfolio and product model, piloted on one slice of the customer journey.
The direct-to-consumer business ran nine brand sites on seventeen largely vendor-managed teams. Demand came through eight intake funnels, six work-tracking projects shared no definition of done, and the organization measured output.
We designed a pilot, one vertical slice of the digital customer journey, to learn whether a value-aligned structure would solve those problems before a wider rollout: a portfolio team balancing demand and capacity, continuously funded product teams aligned to stages of the journey, delivery teams working from a refined backlog, and anchor roles held by the manufacturer's own people. A capability model overlaid on the enterprise architecture, a maturity assessment, impact mapping and objectives and key results gave the portfolio team its instruments.
The teams were assembled and trained, the decisions each tier owns were written with worked examples, and the pilot produced the priorities, the feature backlog and the architecture brief for the first quarterly planning cycle under the new model.
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