Beyond Development – The C.O.R.E. Model for Building Business-Aligned Products
- Brainz Magazine
- Jul 14, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 15, 2025
With a sharp eye for growth and a love for building from the ground up, Palina has led teams, scaled projects, and turned bold ideas into real results. Now, as the Co-Founder of Okeen, she helps companies move smarter, faster, and with purpose in today’s tech-driven world.
Despite all the frameworks, agile ceremonies, and new titles, one truth still holds: many digital products fail not because they weren’t delivered on time, but because they weren’t aligned with what the business actually needed.
After nearly a decade in digital delivery, leading client engagements, building cross-functional teams, and rescuing more than one “on-time but off-target” project, I realized the real gap wasn’t in execution.
Over the past few years, I have developed a practical model that addresses this gap, something I now use in my own work and adhere to at Okeen. I call it C.O.R.E.:
Collaborative, Objective-driven, Reliable & Effective
It’s a delivery philosophy built around business thinking, not just tech execution.
Let’s break it down.
Collaborative
Too often, development starts with specifications and ends with frustration. Misalignment, miscommunication, and missed expectations are symptoms of one root problem: a lack of real collaboration.
Collaboration here doesn’t just mean “being in meetings together.” It means involving the right people early, setting shared goals, and asking uncomfortable but necessary questions before development begins. It’s the difference between “delivering what was asked” and “delivering what works.”
Teams who treat their clients’ business like their own, who care about outcomes, not just outputs, tend to ship smarter products. Period.
Objective-driven
This one is straightforward but often ignored. Velocity, sprint burndown, features shipped, none of those matter unless they connect to business results.
An objective-driven approach flips the starting point. Instead of “What are we building?” the first question is:
“Why are we building this at all?”
It might sound obvious, but in practice, it changes everything. It’s how you avoid wasted months, bloated roadmaps, and launch-day regrets. A feature that improves retention by 5% is more valuable than five that look impressive but change nothing.
When delivery is guided by KPIs instead of ticket counts, product teams stop being service providers and become strategic partners.
Reliable
Reliability is more than being “on time.” It’s about being predictable, transparent, and calm under pressure. It means you don’t need to be micromanaged. You raise red flags early. You plan well and don’t vanish mid-project.
This is especially critical in cross-functional or remote teams, where visibility and trust are everything. Reliability builds confidence, and confidence speeds up decisions.
In short, if the business can’t rely on your delivery, it won’t trust your ideas.
Effective
Effectiveness isn’t measured by story points. It’s measured by whether you delivered the right thing. Effective teams don’t waste time building features no one will use; they prioritize, simplify, and adapt with purpose.
I’ve watched teams spin for weeks on the perfect execution of the wrong solution. Meanwhile, effective teams get results by staying focused on impact, not activity. They make fewer assumptions, ask sharper questions, and know when good enough is truly good enough.
In delivery, being effective means progress with purpose, and that’s what keeps projects on track, on budget, and actually valuable.
Why this matters
As digital becomes core to every business, the gap between strategy and delivery becomes more expensive. The old model, where tech teams execute and business teams evaluate, is outdated.
What we need now are delivery models rooted in a business context. Ones that allow teams to move fast and stay aligned. That’s where C.O.R.E. fits in.
It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s a way of working that consistently leads to fewer surprises, stronger partnerships, and better products.
Final thought
There’s no shortage of tools, platforms, or methodologies. But tools don’t build products, people with expertise do. The C.O.R.E. model is my way of putting structure around what some of the high-performing teams already do intuitively: work collaboratively, stay aligned to business objectives, deliver reliably, and build effectively, with expert insight.
And the best part? It’s simple.
Just ask:
Are we collaborating early and often across teams and with stakeholders?
Is the team aligned on the objective we’re actually trying to achieve?
Can we rely on our delivery process to hold up under pressure?
Are our efforts genuinely effective, or just keeping us busy?
If the answer to any of those is “no,” there’s your next improvement.
Read more from Palina Litvinkovich
Palina Litvinkovich, Co-Founder, Entrepreneur, Project Manager
Palina is an entrepreneur, business strategist and management professional with deep expertise in scaling tech-driven companies. With years of experience across multiple roles in the tech industry, she combines strategic vision with hands-on execution, helping businesses grow, innovate, and stand out in competitive markets.
