Target Operating Model.

TARGET OPERATING MODEL

Lighthouse Sprint — Stage 4: Handoff

A Sprint ships a working system. But the team that ran the old workflow is still organized for the old workflow. Without an explicit reshape, the new system gets metabolized into the old org chart and the velocity gain disappears within a quarter.

This document describes the role architecture that matches the system you just deployed. It is the “what your team looks like on day 90” deliverable. It does not require the client to fire anyone. It does require the client to retire job titles, rebadge roles, and stop hiring for the old shape.

After a Lighthouse Sprint, the durable shape of the team collapses to three functions. Every role on the workflow team maps to one of them. The leadership team is expected to do all three.

Note: the team retains executives above and specialists (legal, finance, compliance) alongside. The three-role rule applies to the workflow team itself — the people who produce the output the system was built around.

2.1 IC sub-roles in this workflow

Map each current job title on the workflow to its post-Sprint IC band.

3.1 DRI map for this workflow

4.1 Player Coaches in this workflow

Visualise the org reshape. Fill in the “current” column with what exists today on the workflow team. The target column is the post-Sprint shape.

Target compression: 5–7 layers collapse to 2–3. The point is not headcount reduction (though it often follows); the point is decision-distance. How many humans does a customer request travel through before it reaches someone who can act? Target: at most two.

For every agent shipped in the Sprint, name the role it augments and the human who reviews its output. This matrix is the cross-reference between the Agent Spec Sheet (USL-T04) and this Target Operating Model.

Every cell in this table is testable: if an agent has no named reviewer or no escalation DRI, governance is broken. Fix before cutover.

7.1 New job ladders

Old ladder: IC → Senior IC → Manager → Senior Manager → Director. One vertical track. New ladder is two parallel tracks branching from Senior IC:

• DRI track — for people whose strength is outcome ownership and decision-making under ambiguity. Compensation tied to customer outcomes.
• Player Coach track — for people whose strength is leverage in others. Compensation tied to IC velocity and the senior-band promotion rate.

Both tracks pay the same. Neither is “up” from the other.

7.2 Hire criteria shift

7.3 Onboarding

Every new hire spends week one as a user of the deployed system before producing in it. No exceptions. The system is the source of truth on how the workflow runs; if the new hire builds a mental model from the old workflow, the redesign is being undone person-by-person.

7.4 Hiring pause

Pause workflow-team hiring during the transition. Job descriptions written before the Sprint no longer apply. Resume hiring after Day 90 with new specs aligned to the IC / DRI / Player Coach model.

Linear sequence from delivery (end of Week 9 of the Sprint) to full cutover. Each week has a milestone and an owner. The exec sponsor signs off on each gate.

The Sprint Lead and the Watch lead participate as advisors through Week 12. After cutover, the client owns the model end-to-end — Watch becomes the surfacing layer, not the driving layer.

The TOM is a snapshot at Day 90, not a fixed end state. As Lighthouse Watch surfaces gaps in the system — the requests the agents can't yet compose, the workflows they can't yet absorb — the role distribution shifts:

• When an agent absorbs a workflow the system used to escalate to humans, an IC role contracts or the IC moves up-band.
• When a new pattern lands from the Studio library, existing ICs gain capacity. That capacity becomes the +1 the DRI assigns next.
• When customer requests cluster in a way the system can't yet compose, the gap is the next item on the roadmap. The DRI decides whether to close it with a workflow redesign or a new agent.

This is the closed loop between Watch and the operating model: the system tells the team what to build next, the team builds it, the team's shape adjusts to absorb it.

9.1 Quarterly TOM review

Every quarter, the Watch lead and the exec sponsor sit together for thirty minutes. One question: does the org shape still match the system shape? If yes, no action. If no, the next rebadge cycle is scoped from the meeting.

Five ways the reshape dies. Each one is the dominant failure mode at the layer it describes — ignore them and the Sprint becomes a productivity story instead of a structural one.

• Bolting agents onto the existing org chart. The whole point of the redesign is that the architecture changes. If everyone keeps their old title and reports to the same manager, the redesign didn't happen — you just paid for tooling.
• Promoting only by adding direct reports. The Player Coach track exists precisely to remove that ladder. If promotion still requires headcount underneath, the old org reasserts itself within two cycles.
• Treating DRI as a project manager. DRI owns outcomes, not coordination. Coordination is a system artifact — the agents surface it. If your DRI is in status meetings all day, they're being used wrong.
• Hiring for the old shape. Job descriptions written six months ago no longer apply. Pause hiring during the transition. Every hire made against an old JD is a vote against the redesign.
• “Gradual” collapse. A 90-day plan that says “we'll get there gradually over the next year” is how the redesign dies. The layers come back faster than they go away. Cutover by Week 12 or accept that the velocity gain will erode.

10.1 Red flags to watch through Day 90