Growing gains: Five pillars that create product-led growth

Traditional micro-improvements to product management often fall short in a competitive market. These changes fail to truly captivate or satisfy customers, meet increased regulatory demands, or satisfy shareholder demands. To create competitive edge and foster sustainable growth, a much more transformative approach is crucial, which embraces both product- and customer centricity.

Here are five key elements to fully adopt a product-led approach in your organisation:

1. Link your product-led strategy to a compelling vision – beware of pet projects

Establishing a product-led strategy requires an organisation to put their customer at the heart of everything they do. However, all requirements need to be proactively prioritised so that perceived desirability isn’t developed without due consideration of feasibility and viability. Striking this balance is the key to sustainable growth.

Strategy should be linked to a compelling vision that clearly articulates – and also engages people around – the outcomes and benefits of becoming ‘product-led’. This should be supported with objective customer and market data that shows how the vision will be brought to life. Without this, key operational decisions will occur in a vacuum, devoid of oversight and governance. This can result in ‘pet projects’ that sap focus, funding, and team capacity away from true strategic priorities.

Our work with a retail bank showed prioritising alignment within the C-suite on their ‘why’ through a co-created case for change and vision for the future accelerated acceptance across their teams. The tricky middle management levels of the operating model, and ways of working were also transformed faster as stakeholders were more amiable to compromise with a shared committed future vision.

2. Create a product-led operating model – lose the siloes

Organisations with a more traditional operating model – defined by structures, accountabilities, behaviours, and processes – typically suffer with capacity and capability dependencies from siloed structures and functional areas. This can significantly affect their ability to innovate and ultimately sustain meaningful growth.

A product-led operating model breaks down siloed thinking and re-aligns the whole organisation to its value creators, which could be its products, services, or customers. This brings together cross-cutting skills, processes, and technology, and empowers individuals across the organisation to experiment and deliver prioritised value against a meaningful purpose. Consistent agile ways of working will create pace in your delivery organisation, embedding a product-led operating model that is organised around your key value drivers and journeys.

Our work in a consumer services organisation showed how re-aligning their organisation into value streams aligned to their core services would allow them to optimise their customer experience. By allocating an accountable owner on both customer accounts and services offered ensures there is a compelling vision, an executable strategy, and the right capabilities (skills, processes, and technology) in place to achieve the right level of customer experience, and service that the organisation is known for.

3. Cultivate your product management capability – don’t just shift roles

The movement from project to product-led thinking is significant. Simply moving people from project-based roles and expecting them to succeed in product roles is setting them up for failure.

Unique insight based on our product management diagnostic tool, which we have run across organisations including healthcare, transport, financial services, and retail shows that the effective management of products and services is not done by one or two roles only (for example a product owner or product manager). Instead, to effectively manage products end-to-end, you need to bring together an ecosystem of capabilities that will likely be held in various parts of the organisation. As you then think about maturing your product management capability, the transformation is twofold: first strengthening the capability where it sits, and second, bringing these capabilities closer together to increase flow.

In one government organisation, we defined a ‘three in the box’ framework model bringing together service, product, and delivery capabilities. This resulted in the establishment of virtual teams to ensure they had all the capabilities required to effectively manage their products and services end-to-end. Overtime this required teams to redefine product management roles, establish consistent artefacts across teams, and refine their processes. Meaning the organisation could continuously increase the throughput of service delivery from establishing the vision, updating the roadmap through defining features, and launching new functionality into the market.

4. Meet evolving needs with an end-to-end lens – never lose sight of the customer

Many product teams are hindered by an organisation’s traditional project mentality, which asks them to focus on short-term timeframes to release initial functionality, and not products that meet evolving customer’s expectations.

Organisations that are truly product-led, embed a culture of long-term customer closeness and continuous improvement. Processes should be baked in to encourage regular customer contact with real people where needs and wants are continually understood, and the co-creation of products where they are tested early and iterated based on fast feedback loops.

Development teams also need to adopt a culture of DevOps, which is a way of working that brings together development and operations. This requires organisations to bring together wide-ranging capabilities into vertical structures that will see a product through its whole lifecycle from design, development, and then into service. Product management therefore needs to evolve so long-standing teams can be built to execute quickly on a clear product strategy and roadmap. This supports existing high-quality functionality whilst developing future features aligned to customer needs.

We helped a global wholesale bank to rescue its product initiative by defining the end-to-end customer journey and the resulting vision for how this would be realised through the products within the portfolio. Product roadmaps were broken down into a single backlog for the product team, and we enhanced team alignment through virtual structures to ensure they were focused on common outcomes. This was pivotal in ensuring customer demands drove the programme’s strategy, aligning with the pillar of creating a customer-centric operating model.

5. Measure product performance throughout its lifecycle – don’t stop at launch

The use of lifecycles are essential to ensure that products are well managed and adapted as they move from introduction through to decline. Lifecycles can be broadly classified into four types: project lifecycles for one-off initiatives, development lifecycles that manage workflow, product lifecycles directing market interaction, and investment lifecycles controlling funding. Each of these types can play a key role in business, however it is primarily the product lifecycle that focuses on evolving products and growing product markets that’s responsible for sustained growth.

For many product managers (PM), the management of a product through its lifecycle – which typically goes through four stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline - requires a change to mindset and skillset. This is because most PMs tend to prioritise getting to the introduction stage where the product is released to the market, and not what needs to happen post launch.

It is essential for a PM to be clear on their ambition for that product at each stage, and what that will look like quantitatively and qualitatively through metrics and feedback gathered. By doing so they will be able to optimise resource allocation, inform strategic decisions around pricing, marketing, and new product ideas, and also longer-term planning.

When this is in place across your portfolio, product management becomes a proactive capability, and organisations are more able to create, grow, and also retire their customer centric products at the right time.

At a global wholesale bank, the replacement of traditional tools with advanced technologies, such as a more sophisticated use of the project management tool JIRA, improved the management and visibility of the product backlog. This clearer reporting and prioritisation directly enhanced support for products through their lifecycle, ensuring customer requirements were well-understood and proactively managed across all teams. This comprehensive approach not only aligned with the company’s vision for a product-led strategy but also established a foundation for sustainable global product development and management.

Scaling innovation to sustainable growth

Together, the five elements outlined above provide the robust foundation necessary for organisations to not only build – but also scale – breakthrough product-led innovations. By keeping customers at the core of every product strategy, businesses can achieve faster and more sustainable growth.