Leaders responsible for digital product development increasingly find themselves in a field of tension. Digital products have become business-critical and must be reliable, secure and continuously available. At the same time, the pressure to innovate remains as strong as ever. Faster time-to-market, new functionality, cloud-native architectures and AI applications all require room for experimentation and further development.

In practice, however, operations and innovation compete for the same people, time and budgets. In scale-ups, the emphasis is often on innovation and speed. Product development is organised in an agile way, decision-making cycles are short, and teams enjoy a high degree of autonomy. This approach accelerates innovation, but over time it frequently leads to increasing operational pressure, growing technical debt and reduced predictability. More mature organisations tend to show the opposite pattern. Their focus is strongly on continuity, stability and governance. This ensures reliability, but slows down innovation and makes it difficult to respond quickly to market changes. In both situations, an imbalance arises that puts the growth and effectiveness of digital products under pressure.

Levi9 has been working with both scale-ups and mature organisations for decades and sees clearly where these worlds can learn from each other. With this benchmark study, Levi9 aims to provide insight into how organisations in different stages of growth and maturity organise this balance. In this research, we map how organisations deal with key challenges in digital product development, such as the division between innovation and maintenance, accelerating time-to-market without losing control, and keeping scale and complexity manageable. 

By combining the perspectives of both scale-ups and mature organisations, we can share concrete best practices from each world. As a participant, you will receive a personal benchmark report in which your organisation is compared with relevant peers. This provides not only insight into your current position, but also into the choices other IT leaders are making to bring innovation and operations into balance.