Two months before the holiday launch, an electronics company I have worked with held its Thursday portfolio review. Exciting right?
Every internal chart looked green; our sprints were on track, test coverage appeared healthy, and the release pipeline was stable. Yet our retail partners kept asking the same question, “Are we going to hit Black Friday?” If you work in a retail-centered organization, you know what Black Friday is: the day we get out of the red!
A quiet supply planner finally spoke up. The Bluetooth module required for the flagship product was in a third-party certification queue that never appeared on our dashboards (the dependency). The supplier had submitted samples, the outside test lab was backlogged, and the contract manufacturer could not commence final assembly without the certificate.
By the time anyone realized, our containers had missed the consolidation cutoff. Air freight was the only option to mitigate the elapsed shipment time, margins were running the risk of being evaporated, and trust with the retailer took a real hit.
Nothing within our teams appeared broken; it just happened that the ecosystem as a whole was invisible. That is the moment we decided to conduct the dreaded pre-mortem. Our agile coaches suggested that we conduct an "outside-in" value stream map, from raw component to customer provisioning and activation, with all stakeholders: our suppliers, labs, the contract manufacturer, logistics, and the retailer; in the same room.
Too bad it takes this late in the game to find it, which is why I prefer to run pre-mortems rather than post-mortems. Let's try to save the patient, not diagnose why they died :)
What?
I've come across a new term (to me) and I like it. Ecosystem Agility means we map how value moves end-to-end across companies, not just within our span of control or our own sprints.
Start with an outside-in value stream, from customer need to customer activation, then work upstream to raw inputs. Put every partner step on the wall: component sourcing, external testing, compliance approvals, factory ramp, logistics milestones, retail setup, and device activation.
Mark where work is touched versus where it waits; call out queues, rework loops, decision handoffs, brittle contract terms, and data gaps. Align on common language and entrance-exit criteria;
- “what does ready mean for test submission”, “what is the definition of shipped for retailer onboarding”.
Establish a shared baseline; lead time across firms, time-to-recover after disruption, on-time-in-full, ecosystem decision latency, first-time-through quality at boundaries. Use flow economics to highlight where big batches and variability inflate queues; use a human-centered lens to spot policies that slow learning; use a coalition idea to secure executive sponsorship across companies.
So What?
Internal velocity can rise while the ecosystem is suffering. Waste then sits in cross-company queues; trust erodes when surprises surface late; leaders push harder on teams, and teams burn energy on the smallest part of the journey. Without a shared map, each firm optimizes locally; the supplier meets unit price but misses certification windows, the logistics provider hits pickup SLAs but misses retailer delivery windows, the retailer schedules promotions without reliable availability.
With a shared outside-in view, everyone can see the same constraint and act together; shorten the test queue, change a batching policy, add a small fast-track lane for seasonal SKUs, and open a real-time data feed so status is not a game of telephone.
A process behavior mindset applies here; you need a calm way to separate signal from noise across firms so you change policies only when the system actually changes.
Now What?
Run a 90-minute ecosystem mapping workshop this week; keep it practical and decisive.
Who: product leader, supply chain lead, engineering lead, supplier account manager, external test or compliance lead, contract manufacturer rep, logistics rep, retailer or channel rep, one finance voice. Your Scrum Master facilitates; your operations lead grounds feasibility.
Scope: one product or product slice tied to a real window, “product holiday bundle”, start at customer activation, end at raw component available.
Agenda:
0–10 minutes, align purpose and vocabulary; confirm start and finish; define “ready” at each boundary.
10–30 minutes, sketch the outside-in flow; put every company boundary on the wall; note approvals and data exchanges.
30–55 minutes, estimate touch time and wait time for the last 10–20 items at each step; mark rework; circle any external queue with high aging.
55–70 minutes, agree on shared metrics; end-to-end lead time, time-to-recover, decision latency across firms, first-time-through quality at boundaries, on-time-in-full to channel.
70–85 minutes, select one joint bottleneck and one policy change; examples: split certification batches weekly instead of monthly, add a pre-submission checklist with the lab, create a retailer fast-track SKU onboarding lane, publish a daily data feed instead of weekly files.
85–90 minutes, assign owners, set a two-week check-in, and decide how you will visualize the shared stream.
Artifacts: a one-page outside-in map, a shared glossary, a baseline metric sheet, and a visible policy experiment with an expected lead-time delta.
Let's Do This!
When every partner sees the same stream, decisions accelerate; resilience becomes shared work. Your internal teams will still sprint, test, and release; the difference is that you are optimizing the whole journey, not just your part of it.
Start with one product, one map, one joint policy change; measure end-to-end lead time and time-to-recover; tell the story together in your next review. That is how ecosystem agility turns missed windows into predictable launches and turns vendor management into a real partnership. Local optimization is an agility killer; let’s start by optimizing for the whole.