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Key ingredients to being a product-led organisation

It’s always very easy to look at companies operating poorly day-to-day and complain about how things are run. It’s much harder to do it in real life, clearly. However, being a product-led, innovative business is something that I think all companies should aspire to. This is a list of some of the key players and what I believe they can do to ensure the business operates in this way.

This is written from a product manager’s perspective and comes from the view of what an organisation can do to ensure a PM does their best possible work.

I think building an amazing culture is another integral part in ensuring your company has the best chance for success, and there is overlap in this area — being product-led means encouraging failure and learning from it as an example, which is an essential cultural trait for the org. My thinking in culture isn’t as clearly defined currently so this will focus on what can be done to be product-led.

Key highlights of being product-led

• The company must be focused on the long-term to a crazy extent;
• Everything needs to be built around solving customer problems;
• Extreme focus on a small number of business challenges;
• All employees really need to be tasked with solving outcomes, rather than outputs;
• Failing can be a great thing and must be encouraged, so long as you learn from it — the speed of learning is of paramount importance;
• Dealing with unstructured problems is the key to success, as your innovation depends on discovering (and solving) unknown unknowns.

How you encourage these behaviours business-wide is beyond the scope of this article, but will be something I document in the future.

How does each role contribute to this?

Founder / GM / CEO

The two main areas of focus for this role to set the business up to be product-led are: 1. To define the vision, and ensure that the points in ‘key highlights’ are acted out in every decision throughout the organisation; 2. To create and clearly articulate the strategy of how the business will achieve its vision.

Outputs I look for from this role:

• A clear definition of the vision of the business and what they see the world looking like in 15 years;
• An explicit definition of the customer and what problems they have;
• An understanding of how to behave in any situation (this isn’t really an output, it’s a general feeling that is communicated through the business — it’s really covered in culture);
• 2-3 strategy points that the business is focused on at that time.

A note on strategy

Having 2-3 strategy points sounds easy — it’s not. The biggest mistake I know of is having 10 strategy points wrapped in vague (but big) MBA-type language. Often, it’s a ‘strategy’ like “increase revenue.” Strategy is how you achieve your goals — not your goals — and it needs to guide what the rest of the organisation works on. If you’re not strategic, you’ll be reactive.

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 opposition’s strengths and weaknesses, the conditions on the day and many other factors to increase your likelihood of winning.

Traits of someone in this role that are useful

• Clear communicator;
• Incredible knowledge of the industry, including the history and trends;
• Hard worker;
• Technically amazing, but a big-picture thinker.

Reading list

• Good Strategy / Bad Strategy
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things
• 7 Powers

CPO / Head of Product

This role needs not only incredible knowledge of the business itself, the market and the industry, but also strong understanding of product across industries.

I don’t believe PMs are looking up to this person for their technical knowledge of the product — in fact, PMs may frequently point out product nuances this role hasn’t seen before.

However, they must be able to communicate a product vision clearly and masterfully. This vision must clarify what outcomes the product group is trying to achieve and what problems are most important to solve (which must be rooted in customer problems).

They must clearly communicate needed outcomes so teams feel empowered to achieve them however they see fit. They should collaborate with VP of Product and PMs to challenge team-level goals and strategies (not dictate them, but maintain an open-door discussion culture).

This role must 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 optimising components rather than the whole.

On the cultural side, this role must support risk-taking and failing fast. One useful approach is encouraging PMs and teams to think in terms of “bets.”

Outputs I look for from this role:

• Clear and concise product vision and product principles;
• Strategic focus for the business and the product over the next year.

Questions this role should ensure are answered and filtered to teams:

• How do all our products work together to provide value (and make sense) to customers?
• What principles should teams follow when building new products?
• Does everything we’re doing make sense from a business and product strategy point of view?

Reading list

• Empowered
• Escaping The Build Trap
• No Rules Rules
• Competing Against Luck

Director of Product / VP of Product

A VP of Product may have 10 or more PMs reporting to them, with a role focused heavily on people leadership as well as mid-to-high-level strategy.

A great VP of Product should:

• Be experienced at the IC level (PM or Senior PM);
• Champion the focus on outcomes (never celebrating mere outputs, e.g. finishing a project that may not move any metrics);
• Mentor PMs with practical problem-solving help (“How could we quickly test this idea?” “Try a Wizard of Oz test here”);
• Be fluent in strategy, market understanding, and product direction;
• Be an exceptional people manager — understanding motivations, emotions, and development goals.

Typically, the best PMs want:

• Huge impact and personal growth;
• To work with other great people;
• To be compensated fairly;
• A no-bullshit environment (no politics or pointless red tape).

A VP’s responsibility is to ensure this environment exists — and act quickly if it doesn’t. Great people will leave before they complain.

What does a PM need in a product-led organisation?

If you don’t put the above structures in place, your PMs will struggle. The strong ones will try to fill gaps but lose focus; the weaker ones will hide in process and backlog grooming.

When set up correctly, PMs clearly understand how to drive meaningful outcomes for the business. To do that, they need:

• Direct access to customers;
• Direct access to engineers;
• Direct access to stakeholders.

A PM must work fast and become an expert in:

• The product (not every bug, but deeply in how it creates value);
• The customer;
• The market.

They must also excel in relationships — inspiring devs and designers, while managing sales, marketing, and exec stakeholders.

With infinite tasks available, PMs need help focusing on what truly matters at any moment. They should prioritise ideation, customer testing, and iteration — over bureaucracy and excessive analysis.

A product-led org should recognise the PM’s role is about navigating unstructured problems — and provide thinking time and support for mental clarity.

Reading list

• Inspired
• Think Like A Rocket Scientist
• Cracking the PM Code

Structure of the teams

One of the easiest things to get right — yet often done poorly. Poor structures include:

• Teams focused on tiny technical components (checkout team, button team), which can lead to irrelevant work when there's nothing critical there;
• Feature teams, which lead to output-fixation and siloed thinking.

Teams must instead be structured around:

• Strategic business goals, or
• Key value streams.

Processes

Product building is inherently unstructured, so over-engineered process frameworks (like SAFe 🤢 or dogmatic Scrum) can be harmful.

While Scrum or Kanban elements can be helpful, teams should never be locked into a one-size-fits-all method.

Instead: - Use a flexible rhythm: Plan → Build (iterate) → Ship - Embrace an open culture of process discussion; - Change process quickly when it’s not working.

Who should manage a project then?

• For individual team projects: direct collaboration between engineers is far more effective than funneling communication through multiple layers of project managers.
• For very large cross-team efforts: a dedicated technical program manager (ideally with engineering background) should coordinate across teams.

Metrics

This is non-negotiable. A product-led organisation must track user engagement and metrics with a solid analytics pipeline.

While PMs cannot operate purely from data, they also cannot operate confidently without it.

Meetings

If forced to pick between traditional meeting-heavy culture or almost no meetings, I’d lean toward fewer meetings.

Meetings don’t just consume time — they destroy productive focus before and after the meeting through context switching.

If a meeting is necessary, I recommend the Amazon approach: - 1-hour block - First 15–20 minutes: silently read a written doc - Remaining time: discussion and feedback

For async updates (e.g. what are you working on, roadblocks?), Slack is enough.

One recurring meeting I would endorse: a weekly sharing and learning session, where each member has ~10 minutes to present something they learned.

Roadmap

Roadmaps often terrify outcome-focused PMs, especially when they are packed with fixed outputs (“Q3: Launch Feature X”). Stakeholders often use them to justify existence rather than drive strategy.

Instead: - Use outcome-based roadmaps (e.g. “Improve conversion rate by 10% this year”). - Each PM/team maintains a living roadmapping document outlining mission → vision → strategy → goals. - Include tentative quarterly plans — flexible enough to evolve as reality shifts.

Planning

Planning often scares PMs because it feels rigid in a role that solves unstructured problems. But when done well, it keeps leadership aligned, clarifies priorities, and helps teams stay focused under pressure.

The best guide I’ve seen on effective planning is this article:
https://review.firstround.com/the-secret-to-a-great-planning-process-lessons-from-airbnb-and-eventbrite