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7 Ways to Restructure IT for Greater Productivity

Restructure IT around user outcomes, durable product teams, reusable platforms, shared accountability, reliable delivery, and experiments that prove what works.
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There is no org chart that guarantees maximum productivity. A stronger IT operating model connects teams to clear business and user outcomes, gives them durable ownership of products or reusable platforms, and removes avoidable work without sacrificing reliability. These seven changes are practical design choices to pilot and adapt—not a one-size-fits-all blueprint.

1. Set the outcomes before redrawing the org chart

Start by defining what the redesign should improve: for example, a customer’s ability to complete a purchase, an employee’s ability to onboard, or the reliability of a critical service. Establish a baseline and decide how you will tell whether the change helped. DORA recommends asking what a transformation is intended to accomplish and whether the organization is becoming better able to serve customers in its guide to organizational transformation.

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Connect technology work to strategic priorities and the people who use the resulting systems. If a proposed structural change cannot be tied to a user need or measurable business result, clarify its purpose before moving teams. An organization chart is a means of enabling outcomes, not an outcome in itself.

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2. Organize durable teams around products and user journeys

Define a product as a technology-enabled offering used by customers or employees, rather than as a temporary project or a particular application. Give a durable team responsibility for the product’s user experience, adoption, delivery, and measurable value. This keeps the people making and operating a service closer to the consequences of their decisions.

A product boundary can follow a meaningful journey. A customer-facing team might own the path from search through payment; an internal product team might support an employee journey from recruitment through onboarding. Choose boundaries that make ownership understandable to users and keep related decisions together. McKinsey’s 2020 operating-model analysis and its 2023 product-and-platform guidance both emphasize linking technology teams to products and business priorities.

3. Build platforms as products for internal users

Product teams often need common capabilities—such as deployment workflows, infrastructure services, or other shared engineering tools. A platform team can provide these once for multiple teams to reuse. Its users are developers, so treat the platform as an internal product: learn where their work is difficult, publish a roadmap, gather feedback, and make common tasks easier through self-service.

Start with a minimum viable platform that addresses a high-friction workflow rather than attempting a comprehensive platform build at once. DORA’s platform engineering guidance, last updated January 12, 2026, warns that platforms can become bottlenecks when built without user research, feedback, or extensibility. It also cautions against rigid standards and ticket-driven service models. Measure whether teams can use the capability and complete work more independently—not simply whether the platform has launched.

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4. Share accountability between business and technology

Include the business functions closest to a product’s users in its decisions, and agree on outcomes jointly with technology leaders. Business leaders can bring context about customer needs and commercial priorities; technology leaders can assess architecture, security, reliability, and delivery implications. Shared accountability helps prevent a product team from optimizing a technical measure while missing the result the business needs.

McKinsey describes “two-in-a-box” business and technology leadership and a “three-in-a-box” product, design, and engineering model as arrangements organizations use; they are examples, not mandatory templates. Pick a leadership structure that gives the team the expertise and authority its product requires, and make decision rights explicit.

5. Connect infrastructure, automation, and reliability

Infrastructure work should enable product teams to deliver safely without making every change depend on a separate queue. Consider combining site reliability engineering (SRE), infrastructure services managed as products, outcome management, and engineering-focused talent. Automate repeatable provisioning and operational workflows where appropriate, while keeping reliability and change risk visible alongside delivery speed.

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The right arrangement depends on the existing architecture, cloud strategy, and operating maturity. For example, compare these choices against the work your teams actually need:

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Design choice Potential fit Trade-off to assess
Application-aligned SRE support When a product’s reliability needs and operational context call for close collaboration with its team Whether expertise is duplicated across products or teams can still reuse common practices
Shared SRE or infrastructure solution teams When common services or scarce expertise need to support multiple product teams Whether shared ownership creates queues, handoffs, or distance from application context
Cloud-specific services When the organization’s architecture and cloud plans make provider-specific capabilities appropriate Whether the resulting services fit the intended architecture and operating model
Hybrid-capable services When teams must support a mix of on-premises and cloud environments Whether the additional breadth matches real needs rather than adding unnecessary complexity

McKinsey’s cloud-ready operating-model guidance says these infrastructure practices can apply on-premises as well as in cloud settings. It reports improvements of 20 percent or more in resiliency, labor productivity, and time to market among companies combining four practices; that is a reported outcome, not a forecast for every organization. The same article reports one B2B service-provider case with a 60 percent reduction in change failure rate and a 30 percent reduction in labor spend. Those case figures should not be generalized to other organizations.

6. Make priorities, governance, and dependencies visible

Give each product and platform accountable leaders, then establish a light coordinating mechanism for decisions that cross team boundaries. It should help teams balance product and platform priorities, identify dependencies, and focus scarce resources on strategy. Keep routine decisions close to the teams doing the work where possible; coordinate shared platform changes and competing resource needs rather than sending every choice up a hierarchy.

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Make ownership clear when products depend on common capabilities. Teams need to know who can approve a shared change, how conflicts are resolved, and where to raise a dependency that blocks delivery. McKinsey’s 2023 guidance discusses coordination and accountability as part of getting product-and-platform transformations right.

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7. Build skills and scale through experiments

A new reporting structure will not by itself close gaps between traditional IT and digital teams. Identify the engineering, product, design, reliability, and platform capabilities the intended model needs. Set shared working practices, develop or reskill current staff, and hire for capabilities that are missing. Plan for cultural differences as well as role changes.

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Pilot the model in a priority area, give teams room to experiment, and expand practices that work. DORA’s transformation guide describes the ingredients this way: “There are two key ingredients in effective, ongoing transformation: processes for executing organizational change by setting goals and enabling team experimentation, and mechanisms to spread good practice through the organization.” The guide names Jez Humble as its author.

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Measure productivity without rewarding the wrong thing

Do not treat activity, output volume, or coding speed as productivity on their own. Pair business outcomes with delivery quality and the experience of the people building and using the systems. Choose a small set of measures that reflects the intended change, establish a baseline, and review them together so that a gain in one area does not conceal harm in another.

  • Business and user results: whether the product solves its intended user problem and supports the agreed business outcome.
  • Delivery and reliability: delivery performance and service reliability, including whether changes introduce failures.
  • Platform value: whether product teams adopt shared services, complete common tasks through self-service, and can work more independently.
  • Experience: whether developers and end users can complete their tasks successfully and whether friction is declining.

DORA’s platform engineering page summarizes 2024 research associating developer independence—the ability to complete tasks without relying on an enabling team—with a 5 percent productivity improvement at both team and individual levels. The page does not provide further study-design details in that passage, so treat the figure as an attributed association rather than a guaranteed effect of a reorganization. McKinsey’s 2023 article reports that nearly three-quarters of top-performing companies in its 2022 survey had senior technology leaders highly involved in shaping company strategy. It also reports, from its experience with product-and-platform transformations, potential outcomes of up to three times faster time to market and 50 to 70 percent fewer product defects. These are reported findings and potential outcomes, not promised results.

Adoption has also varied: McKinsey’s February 2020 article cited an 18 percent share of respondents in a 2018 survey whose companies had converted digital and IT teams to one operating model or developed a fully digital model. The article also gives a one-third share for a more recent survey without identifying its year in the cited passage, so that later figure does not establish a dated trend.

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