Ensuring you are delivering the highest value to your customers in quick iterative cycles is a tenant of Lean and Agile. But as organizations grow it becomes more complicated to allocate budget and build a portfolio that includes innovative transform initiatives as well as initiatives to address your technical debt and enhance your existing solutions. A single rank ordered backlog based on value may be too simplistic. Instead, enterprise businesses can use a framework that was popularized by Gartner to build a well balanced portfolio of initiatives for each value stream using the following three categories :

• Run: Carry out essential enterprise activities that do not connect directly to a particular customer segment (or, to put it another way, to a particular revenue stream)
• Grow: Enhance business performance in established markets serving established customer segments with established value propositions
• Transform: Enter new markets with new value propositions for new customer segments

Most businesses have no issues building a backlog of Run and Grow initiatives but wisely spending the budget allocated to Transform is another matter. Applying a lean startup approach to managing this part of the portfolio can lead organizations to establish investment boards to oversee the evolution and iterative investment in transform initiatives. This is a group of senior stakeholders - both technical and non-technical - that meet regularly to evaluate the results of discovery / design sprints, discuss the goals for the next iteration and ultimately fund or kill the initiative. It functions as the enterprise equivalent of venture capital.