The key ingredients to a product-led organisation

No great business exists without a phenomenal product. And to build phenomenal products requires two things:

  1. Amazing product people; and
  2. An organisation that is set up to be product-led and allow these product people to flourish.


Yes, this is a gross simplification. In some business models like enterprise level products, a sales team could be the difference. Or if you have a product that is essentially a commodity (e.g. mattresses), the marketing team could be the difference between failure and success. However, a phenomenal product is the surest way to have success. A strong product is like a supercharger for the rest of your business too. It makes the Sales and Marketing Teams’ jobs 100x easier. It reduces the amount of need for Customer Support and even the CEO will have a much easier life if they can let the product do the talking.

I’ve already talked about the key skills of a Product Manager (PM), and now I’d like to discuss the factors in setting up an organisation that is product-led. It will focus on the early stages from 0-500 employees. It will talk about structure of the product org, processes within the product teams and what senior leaders can do to ensure a PM does their best possible work.

It’s written from a PM’s perspective approaches the problem from this view, outlining what an organisation can do to ensure a PM does their best possible work.

The key traits of being product-led

The following points are the keys to a business that I’d call ‘product-led’:

  • Long-term thinking: Not setting a vision for the next 3 years, but thinking 10 – 30 years ahead.
  • Extreme focus on the customer problem: Everyone should know what the customer problem is you’re solving. Employees, investors, advisors: they should know who the customer is and how your business is making their life much better.
  • Outcomes over output: Everything in the company needs to be geared towards achieving outcomes. Celebrating a product being released is a warning sign.
  • Focus, focus, focus: All strategy documents at the organisational level, and the team level should be short and succinct. This is not because they’re slapped together quickly. Quite the opposite, this requires an enormous amount of work. But in the end, there should be a small and focused list of what the company is strategically focused on, what its mission is and what its principles are.
  • Comfortable with failure: The organisation must be accepting (actually encouraging) of failure, so long as lessons are learned. No solution will be right the first time and this must be totally accepted throughout the organisation.
  • Speed, speed, speed: “Unquestionably, speed is always the best advantage you can build into your company. The products that can iterate and evolve the fastest will tend to win over the long run.” – Aaron Levie (CEO of Box)
  • Clear goals, objectives and metrics: whatever framework you use (OKRs for example), there must be clear objectives and measurable key results to ensure you’re progressing to where you plan to go. These should be shared widely.

Structuring the product teams

Setting the product teams to be working on the right part of the product is a crucial first step to get right in being a product-led business. In short, there are many ways you can structure it, and there isn’t a perfect model. There are wrong ways to do it though.

First common wrong way to do it: build the a product team per feature of the product. This encourages PMs to find changes to make to justify their job. For example, you may be part of an e-commerce business and set teams up around the home page, adding to cart and the checkout. You’re the PM of the checkout team and this is already converting at the best rate of anything in market. There’s not actually much you can do to improve it, but you have to justify your job. So you do work anyway and change where the credit card is captured. This causes conversion in the checkout to decrease – quite clearly a bad outcome for the business.

The same issues occur when teams are set up around the technical components of the product – like owning 3 APIs for example. The problem is that the PMs in these cases are incentivised to find problems with their part of the product whether or not problems exist.

The way that will encourage much greater success is by aligning around the strategic goals of the company, or the value streams. But how do you actually do this? There are two options:

  1. Base it off the strategic goals set from the top. So a strategic goal may be ‘increasing revenue from new customer sales from new marketing channels.’ You would then have a team set up around the customer’s first touch with the product.
  2. Create a customer journey map and identify parts of the customer’s journey that create value and need solving. A customer journey map identifies what the customer is feeling when dealing with your product – from the first time they hear about it until their continued interaction with it. If you read my previous article, it wouldn’t surprise you to know I’m slightly obsessed with Duolingo. Another thing that wouldn’t surprise you: they set up their product teams incredibly well around the value streams of the business:

Are strict processes the devil?

Building a product is an inherently unstructured problem to solve, and therefore, I think trying to implement strict processes to govern the entire situation is moronic. Some frameworks that are commonly used include kanban, scrum, SAFe etc.

Generally, in a product-led organisation, I believe each team should have the autonomy to operate however they want. I’d strongly recommend never ever use SAFe or a strict-scrum though. There are too many meetings, too much long-term designation of work and these processes don’t allow for speed whatsoever. They ensure that the weakest people in the teams can do work to a certain level, rather than letting the best people work as well as they can.

I’d suggest using a plan > build (iterate) > ship methodology, but test a number of ways of working in your team. If you implement a process and it doesn’t work, you can always scratch it. It’s also vital here to have an extremely open environment for people to share how they’re feeling and what they think of how things are operating.

Processes may not be the devil, but pointless meetings are

Speed in a company is the result of many factors, but limiting meetings in number, time and people attending is a great way to start.

I’m not totally anti-meeting. I’m only anti-meeting where people are involved who don’t contribute and when it slows the work down, which happens to be most meetings. I’m a fan of the Amazon way to negate these negative impacts. That is, the person who calls the meeting needs to provide written context at the start of the meeting. This creates a shared understanding of why people are in the meeting, and what needs to come from the meeting. Other attendees shouldn’t need to do anything before getting in the meeting, but they should be able to contribute to help the caller of the meeting get the information and understanding they need.

Meetings that are vital: one on ones with your manager are essential and should be cherished; and frequent sharing of what you’ve been learning in meeting form should be done.

Planning and roadmapping

These are both areas that frighten a lot of PMs (myself included) because of how poorly they can be done. Both are inherently rigid concepts, yet product-led organisations are solving unstructured problems – it doesn’t seem to make sense.

However, when done correctly, planning is essential for leadership to have an understanding of what is being done to attack the company’s biggest problems, as well as keeping the team aligned and motivated when things get tough.

In terms of setting roadmaps, a lot of people in output-focused businesses are desperate for a roadmap for the next year to see what will be worked on and to justify everyone’s existence within the organisation. This will include a whole bunch of big projects that will transform the business. But this is the wrong way to go about it.

My solution is to have outcome-focused roadmaps over the year (ie. improve the conversion rate over the year by 10%) and produce a ‘roadmapping’ document. This is a live document that outlines the mission > vision > strategy and goals (outcomes) of the team. It will also include plans for the next few quarters, which may be changed as conditions change. This is a great article, with templates to look at:

An Actionable Guide to Product Roadmaps (with templates)

To do planning well is difficult, but this article is the best I’ve found to help all people involved:

The Secret to a Great Planning Process – Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite

What can senior roles at the organisation do to get the most from the best PMs?

To test whether a company is product-led, you should be extracting the maximum value of every single product manager. While this is clearly not everything these leaders will do in their role, these are the important factors to empower each to operate at their best.

Founder / GM / CEO

What the PMs will be looking to from the CEO are (1) an extremely clear and concise vision; and (2) an articulate strategy of how the business will achieve its vision. These two factors, if done well, should guide the PM to make the best decisions for the business.

The founder (or CEO or GM) should be a clear communicator, extremely hard working and technically amazing, but also a visionary. They should also have incredible knowledge of the industry, including history and trends.

A note on strategy

A strategy should be wrapped up in 3-5 key points. 3-5 key areas of focus sounds easy, it’s not. The biggest mistake I know of is having 10-15 strategy points wrapped in vague (but big) MBA fluff. Strategy like “increase revenue” is not going to be something that will help me, as a PM, make a call on what we should prioritise next.

Think of business strategy as a soccer game. Most strategies involve the equivalent of “let’s score more goals than the opposition.” A good strategy though determines your biggest strengths, your weaknesses, your oppositions strengths and weaknesses, the conditions on the day and many other factors to increase your likelihood of winning.

Reading list for this role

Not limited to the below, but these are books I’ve found to have good insights on the above (this list will be constantly updated):

  • Good Strategy / Bad Strategy
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things
  • 7 Powers
  • The Innovator’s Dilemma / The Innovator’s Solution
  • Stratechery

CPO / Head of Product

This role needs to set product principles, a strong product vision and a coherent product strategy that is ruthlessly prioritised around a few key goals. Without this, you end up with an organisation that is built around optimising components rather than the whole. These principles, the vision and the strategy should make it clear to all PMs what problems are most important to the business to solve at this moment in time.

I don’t believe PMs are looking up to this person for their incredible technical knowledge of their specific product. In fact, Junior PMs may be able to show things in the product that this person hasn’t seen before.

They should be working with the VP of Product and the PMs to challenge the goals and team strategies that are being set. They should not be setting them for the teams.

They should be facilitating a product organisation that is comfortable with failure. They should be ruthless on ensuring lessons are learned with every product change. They should not be forcing each product launch to hit a certain goal that is set.

The questions this role should be answering and filtering down to the teams are:

  • How do all our products work together to provide value (and make sense) to our customers?
  • What guidelines and principles should the individual teams be following when building new products?
  • Does it all make sense from a business and product strategy point of view?
Reading list
  • Empowered
  • Escaping the build trap
  • No rules rules
  • Competing against luck
  • Crossing the chasm

Director of Product / VP of Product

A VP of Product may have 10 or more PMs reporting to them. This role differs from an individual contributor (IC) because there is a lot of people management in the role. Yes, having product skills are necessary, but people management is just as important. They are also on the hook for more strategic level thinking than an IC.

In this product-led company, the VP of Product must also be a champion of the outcome approach. This means they’ll need to be careful what types of behaviour they praise and reward. Praising a big product launch is like using a lottery winner as a great example of how to get rich.

So they must be a mentor (or a coach as everyone now calls it) for the PMs underneath them, they must be able to speak to the business and product principles and strategy and they must be great people managers.

A VP of Product should be having 1 on 1s with each PM each week, so that will take a lot of time. They’ll need to help set goals, give feedback on ideas and strategies, help suggest better ways of doing product (”what’s the best way to test this idea quickly?”) and they need to be aware of their staffs’ motivations and emotions.

The VP’s job is to detect the right environment is being set. If it’s not, they must act quickly to fix it. Good people will frequently leave before they raise their deepest concerns.

In summary, it’s a difficult job.

Reading list
  • High Output Management
  • Measure What Matters
  • Inspired

What a PM needs in a product led organisation

As an organisation, if you don’t do all of the above, it’s going to be very difficult to get the most out of your PMs. The best ones will probably try and do some of the above, but get confused while doing so and not focus on their core job. And the bad ones will probably have some process they can follow where they shift tickets in the backlog all day long, and call a bunch of group meetings.

But let’s assume this is all set up nicely, the PMs will have a clear understanding of their role and how they can contribute to the business growing (which is surely what everyone wants). The other things you’ll need to setup as a product-led organisation for the PMs is:

  • Direct access to customers
  • Direct access to engineers
  • Direct access to stakeholders


To succeed, the PM needs to work quickly and focus on becoming an expert in a number of areas – the product (you don’t need to understand and solve every bug that comes in, but still have a deep knowledge of how it’s used), the customer and the market.

The product-led organisation must help PMs by understanding that it’s an unstructured problem they’re working on, and give them space to think. The PM will reward the business by working incredibly hard, executing and delivering value very quickly. They must also highlight failures they make to ensure the product group as a unit evolves.

Reading list
  • Inspired
  • Cracking the PM code
  • The Mom Test


The above is not a definitive list of ‘how to grow a successful company,’ however it is a number of key points that will empower the product managers, and the product organisation, to flourish. Having Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath in the same side will help your cricket team win a lot, but it’s not a certainty. With a strong product organisation, the rest of the business is in a great place to grow rapidly, but it’s no certainty.