Before the Model Comes the Mission

The Conceptual Foundation

Edith A. Hughes, D.Sc.  ·  Adaptive Value Design LLC  ·  2026

I. The Foundation the Model Requires

Across the federal government, "product operating model" has become the idea of the moment. Think tanks are publishing frameworks. Consultants are proposing transformations. Agency executives are hearing the term in briefings, at conferences, and in strategic planning conversations. The language of empowered teams, continuous delivery, and product thinking is spreading quickly.

The implementation is not keeping pace. With rare exceptions, most agencies have not yet moved beyond the conversation. The gap between discussing a product operating model and successfully putting one into practice is wide, and the reason is consistent: agencies are reaching for a model before they have answered the question the model is meant to address. What value are we here to deliver, and to whom?

That question sounds simple. It is not. Moving straight from "we need to modernize" to "let's adopt a product operating model" produces a particular kind of failure: one that looks like transformation while the underlying structural misalignment remains unaddressed.

The Niskanen Center has done important work examining how government should deliver digital services, including a compelling case for product-oriented teams and the role of product managers in aligning agencies around user needs. That work is right, and this series builds on it by adding a foundation it does not yet address. Before product teams can align around user needs, leaders need to collectively define, quantify, and own what "user needs" means in the context of their federal mission. In most agencies, they haven't. This series is about that missing foundation.

II. Value is Defined by Those Who Receive It

Warren Buffett has a useful distinction: price is what you pay, value is what you get. In the private sector, that definition is relatively straightforward. In federal government, it is considerably more complex. No market price signal exists. No single customer exists. The people who fund the work are rarely the people who receive the benefits.

This is why federal leaders need a more precise definition of value, along with a more precise understanding of who their customers are.

Any flow of delivering value involves three distinct categories of customers, each containing multiple specific roles. The first category is Consumers: the end users or beneficiaries who directly receive the service, and the brokers or intermediaries who operate on their behalf. When a taxpayer files their return through TurboTax or H&R Block, both the taxpayer and the tax preparation company are consumers of the IRS's value stream. The second category is Producers: the employees who interact directly with customers or support service delivery behind the scenes, and the external partners, suppliers, and contractors who enable it. The third category is Approvers: externally, Congress and the oversight bodies that provide authorization, legal guardrails, and appropriate funding; internally, the executives who authorize investment decisions and the oversight functions that govern how the organization operates.

Most federal transformation efforts focus almost exclusively on end users, the most visible consumer role. That focus is correct but incomplete. Leaders who haven't mapped all three customer categories, and the specific roles within each, are designing an operating model around a partial picture of the value they're responsible for delivering.

Identifying these roles is not a desk exercise. The Customer Roles Framework is a design framework that enables federal leaders to answer the question together. The companion piece linked below provides the full context. That collaborative act of mapping customers to a shared value stream is itself the beginning of alignment.

III. Value Streams, Not Products

Understanding who your customers are is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Leaders also need to understand how value flows to those customers.

Federal government delivers mission value primarily through service delivery: the series of interactions and steps between producers and consumers to co-create value. When a taxpayer calls the IRS with a question, or when they file their taxes, they are not receiving a "product"; they move through a sequence of touchpoints — filing, processing, correspondence, resolution — that involve people, systems, policy, and judgment at every stage. Software fits into and enables that flow. It is not the whole flow.

Value streams are not simply "products" or service journeys. They are any coherent series of steps through which an organization produces value, whether the result is an outcome for a citizen, a decision for an executive, or a capability for a mission team. The value stream also defines the scope for applying the Customer Roles Framework. The three customer categories look different depending on whether the value stream in view is a core agency mission — revenue collection, income security benefits, border protection — or a specific product or service within it. Defining the value stream first is what makes the customer mapping meaningful rather than generic.

IV. A Framework with a Focus on Value

Defining value, mapping customers, and understanding the flow of delivering value are not tasks that any single executive can accomplish alone. They require a leadership team that can see the whole system and that is willing to own it together.

The Public Value Aperture is a framework for thinking about that system. It defines an operating model as six interlocking elements: Mission Domains & Strategy, Customer Insight, Organization Design, Service Delivery, Technology Enablement, and Measures, arranged like the blades of a camera aperture. No single blade produces the image. They work together or they fail together.

The six elements are grouped into two sets: Mission Domains & Strategy, Customer Insight, and Measures form the outer ring of Institutional Direction: they define value in context of the mission before anything else is designed, and measure performance in delivering that value. Organization Design, Service Delivery, and Technology Enablement work together as the Enabling Systems that deliver the value. That sequence is not arbitrary. It is the argument of this series in visual form: value must be defined before the model can be built.

V. The Leadership Imperative

None of this happens on its own. The Public Value Aperture does not self-assemble. The value streams do not reveal themselves. The three customer categories do not map themselves to the flow of service delivery. Someone has to do that work, and in a federal agency, that someone is the executive leadership team, working together.

This is the leadership imperative at the center of this series: federal executives need to work as a team to define, and identify quantitative measures for, value at an enterprise level. Then they need to develop a shared understanding of the system of systems they jointly manage to deliver that value. Those two steps, in that sequence, are what make everything else possible. Without them, an operating model transformation is a reorganization with better branding.

Most federal executive teams are typically structured for functional accountability, not collective ownership of the whole. Senior leaders are typically appointed to manage a function: a program office, a technology organization, a mission support division. They are accountable for their piece. They are rarely held accountable for the whole. The whole is precisely what a value stream operating model requires them to see, agree on, and own together.

VI. Before the Model, the Mission

Federal agencies have invested heavily in technology modernization over the past two decades. Many of those efforts have delivered real improvements: new systems, faster processing, better digital interfaces. But technology modernization alone addresses only one element of a sociotechnical challenge. Upgrading systems without aligning the organizational structures, authorities and accountabilities, and physical architecture that surround them updates the technology inside the same dysfunction.

The product operating model represents a genuine advance on that pattern. It is attracting serious attention as a leading practice precisely because it reaches beyond technology, toward empowered teams, continuous delivery, and alignment around user needs. That promise is real. But the model is not yet being applied with the full foundation it requires. Empowered product teams need a shared definition of value to align to. Value streams cannot be identified without a shared understanding of who the customers are and how service flows to them.

Before the model comes the mission. Before the value stream comes the value. Before the transformation can begin, the leadership team must do the hardest work first: sitting together, mapping their customers, tracing their service delivery flow, and reaching a shared, quantified understanding of what public value they exist to deliver.

That work is not technical. It is not a consulting engagement. It is a leadership imperative, and it is the foundation that makes everything else possible.

That definition of value must come first. Everything else follows from it.

The articles that follow examine what happens when leaders do that work and what happens when they don't. They explore why federal executives struggle to function as an enterprise team, how deliberate leadership engagement can build alignment while solving a real problem, and why the structural alignment of business domains, authority with accountabilities, and architecture is the missing piece that makes everything else hold.