The Bottleneck CoE
Your Center of Excellence became a gate. Teams bypass you. Your C-suite is asking questions.
You're the The Bottleneck CoE if:
- ✓ We built a CoE but now every team hates us — we're a bottleneck
- ✓ Teams run tests without us and we find out when results leak out
- ✓ We have governance docs nobody reads
- ✓ Product squads run conflicting experiments and we have no conflict detection
- ✓ I need to prove the CoE is worth its headcount
Why you're stuck
You designed governance to ensure quality. Teams interpret it as bureaucracy. The structural fix is to redesign the CoE as an enabler — guardrails built into self-service tooling, not a gate that teams have to ask permission from. This is a re-org problem, not a process problem.
Who you are: VP of Experimentation or Head of Product at enterprise. Has a CoE. The CoE was built to spread experimentation — instead, it became a control function. Politics are intense.
Next stage: The Compounding Team
You've outgrown your tools. The next gains are in measurement, not test count.
See the The Compounding Team playbook →CoE Redesign
Restructure governance so teams run experiments faster, not slower.
CoE audit, governance-as-enablement redesign, self-service tooling spec, change-management plan for the rollout. 8-week engagement.
Get a CoE Redesign →