Leading Lean Product Management with the 3 Flight Levels Model

How to break down Visions into actionable Backlog Items — Solving Scaled Agile for good.

Executing Strategy is one of the hardest things you, as a Product Manager, have to do.

Creating a Vision and a Roadmap is easy in comparison to the execution of the Strategy and the pursuit of the Product Vision.

A product roadmap is a representation of your product strategy, it is not a concrete plan, but a living document that helps you communicate your product strategy to your most important partners and stakeholders.

Breaking down the Vision and Product Goals

To execute your Product Strategy and lead your lean product development team, you need to break down the very abstract concept of a Product Vision and a Product Strategy into executable, actionable Backlog Items.

This huge challenge calls for a clear meta-model that explains what this breakdown structure looks like and how it is organized.

We use the Flight Level Concept, combined with a Product Management Artifacts Breakdown, to explain and visualize the connection between different artifacts and levels.

So let’s have a deep dive into the 3 Flight Levels, and see how the different artifacts and events/meetings are connected to these levels. Let’s see how we create the artifacts, as well as in what frequency these events happen.

3 Flight Levels to lead your Lean Product Development Team

The agile flight level concept was first created by Klaus Leopold in his Book “Rethinking Agility” (German: Agilität neu Denken). It compares agile execution with three flight levels.

The metaphor — when you look out of your window in an airplane, you will see different things and think of different things at each of the three flight levels.

• 1st Flight Level — Low altitude, you see details on the ground like cars, trees, buildings, people,…
• 2nd Flight Level — Higher altitude, you see broader patterns like cities, streets, traffic flow, …
• 3rd Flight Level — highest altitude, you can’t get higher without leaving the…