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Objective Tagging: Gartner's Run / Grow / Transform Modal

· Mark Holt

There are many different models that we can use when the board asks, “How much of our roadmap is keeping the lights on versus moving the market?”, one of the simplest and easiest ways to answer might be to leverage Gartner’s Run • Grow • Transform (RGT) model. Yet many product teams use the labels casually—without tapping the model’s full power to focus decisions, calm finance directors, and protect genuine innovation from budget creep.

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1. Where Run Grow Transform Came From—and Why It Stuck

Gartner coined RGT in the mid-2000s while analysing IT budgets that were ballooning under the twin pressures of regulatory compliance (Sarbanes-Oxley had just landed) and post-dot-com growth. Boards needed language that felt both financial and strategic. “Run, Grow, Transform” captured that mix:

  • Run spend keeps current operations reliable and secure. Think upgrade cycles, bug fixes, and the endless grind of patching.
  • Grow spend expands today’s core business into adjacent customers or geographies.
  • Transform spend bets on new markets or business models, acknowledging higher uncertainty and longer pay-offs.

Because the terms map to cash-flow timing and risk appetites, CFOs adopted them quickly. Once the finance function cares, the language spreads company-wide.

2. Deep-Diving the Three Buckets

Run: Protecting the Revenue Floor

“Run” is not glamorous, yet a single missed payroll file or security breach can dwarf any flashy new feature. Typical items:

  • Sustaining engineering for live products
  • Cyber-security hardening
  • Cloud cost optimisation
  • Mandatory regulatory changes (e.g., PSD3 for payment providers)

A mature product organisation measures Run work against service-level objectives (SLOs). If incident burn-rate hits a threshold, more Run capacity triggers automatically—an elegant, metrics-driven safeguard that avoids emotional firefighting meetings.

Grow: Extending the Proven Core

Grow initiatives aim for incremental revenue that compounds. They usually:

  1. Leverage existing technology and brand credibility.
  2. Reach adjacent segments (new vertical, region, or buyer persona).
  3. Deliver in 6–24 months, so finance can book forward ARR.

Product managers must articulate clear lagging and leading indicators—for example, partner sign-ups (leading) versus cross-sell MRR (lagging). This transparency reassures boards that Grow work is neither vanity nor Transform in disguise.

Transform: Betting the Franchise

Transform projects—an AI‐native product line in a historically on-prem company, for instance—compete with acquisitions for capital. They demand:

  • Dedicated discovery funding to reduce “unknown unknowns.”
  • Executive air-cover to shield teams from quarter-to-quarter revenue pressure.
  • Explicit kill criteria tied to validated learning, not sunk cost.

When presented well, Transform stories energise investors because they prove leadership isn’t milking a cash cow but cultivating the next one.

3. Using RGT in Quarterly Portfolio Reviews

Boards rarely object to innovation; they object to opacity. Tagging every roadmap item with an R, G, or T badge gives finance an instant heat-map of runway risk. A typical cadence:

  1. Baseline the current mix (e.g., 58 % Run, 32 % Grow, 10 % Transform).
  2. Set guard-rails—say, no less than 15 % Transform over a rolling 18-month horizon.
  3. Track deviations quarterly, just as you do for EBITDA.

Because the language is simple, discussions shift from individual features to portfolio trade-offs. Should we pause a Transform moon-shot to plug a Run security gap? The answer becomes a strategic choice, not a tug-of-war between heads of engineering and product.

4. Day-to-Day Implications for Product Teams

  • Backlog triage: During sprint planning, label stories so velocity reports roll up to Run/Grow/Transform dashboards automatically.
  • Talent allocation: Rotate senior engineers through Transform squads to cross-pollinate skills.
  • OKRs: Tie Run OKRs to reliability metrics, Grow OKRs to expansion revenue, Transform OKRs to validated learning milestones (e.g., “Prove willingness to pay among three design partners”).

5. RGT in RoadmapOne

RoadmapOne lets you add a custom tag group with three mutually exclusive tags. Once enabled, the analytics update in real time. The result: executives see the ratio shift the moment a PM re-tints a card, eliminating the monthly slide-deck grind.

6. Key Takeaways

  • Run preserves customer trust; Grow amplifies the core; Transform invents the future.
  • Visibility across the three eases board anxiety and protects innovation budgets.
  • Automating the tagging workflow in RoadmapOne replaces Excel gymnastics with live, data-driven conversations.