Product lead company considered harmful.

I, by now, perceive a product lead company as similar harmful for the business as a sales lead company, marketing lead one or an ego-driven one. If you view everything through the product lense, you still end up with just one point of view. — I, social media post

I had the luck to work with a lot of different power dynamics companies over the years. A new variation emerged some years ago: the product lead company.

Simple said a product manager (PMs) is in charge of a multifunctional team. They are directly responsible for creating deliverables with the team and launching it to the outside world. The product lead takes requirements from marketing, sales, dev, design, legal, … Prioritizes them, assigns tasks in whatever framework the company operates in create, quality assures, and launches.

Sounds sane, is a similar sh*tshow like the other X lead companies approaches, over time. As the PMs have their own OKRs the prioritization is skewed, as the PM reports the head of product with their personal goals, resource allocation is skewed. But even a more significant issue is the singular point of view that gets created over time.

• A marketing lead company leads to faster horses (instead of cars).
• A sales lead company leads to products that were overpromised and underdeliver.
• A design lead company leads to butterfly keyboards.
• A dev lead company leads to solutions that solve interesting problems with hipster technology, instead of solutions for fundamental problems with pragmatic choices.
• An ego-driven company leads to a brittle/unresilient company,
• A product lead company leads to features over function, and divided “product core company” vs. “the rest.”

So what’s the right way?

I am working the internet now for more than 20 years, with companies of all sizes, organizational structures, decision-making processes. There is no way in collaborating that does not have a downside, and the downside might change based on what stadium the company currently is.

In general silos — a marketing department, a sales department, IT, product — work easiest and scale the best. But produce the least innovation, from none to negative innovation. Additional a silo in itself has 0 value, as value only gets created when product, marketing, sales, design, dev, … Works jointly and releases something to the outside world.

Multifunctional teams, matrixed teams, “startup mode” do the most straightforward job of creating innovation and initial value. But as soon as they reach a particular size, execution completely breaks down. (First crisis 70+ employees, the second one, the big one, at 150+ employees).

In the end, it is all about collaboration. Constant collaboration and high execution throughput are realistically not possible.

I now go for the snowman.

Separated lengths of execution of different groups. Regular, mutually enriching, reinforcing, and goal setting collaboration points. But that’s going to be another article.

About the Author

Franz Enzenhofer changes the internet since 1998. Over his career he worked with startups, market leaders, startups then market leaders, market leaders that reinvented themselves as startups, state-owned companies, freelancers, concert halls, cities, political parties, betting companies, NGOs, economic chambers, TV stations, family-owned small businesses, Fintechs, old school banks, national and international newspapers and news agencies, media houses, media conglomerates, sport teams and more. He worked with organizations in the US, UK, D.A.CH, Ireland, India, Thailand, Peru, Colombia, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Croatia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Gibraltar, Sweden, Cyprus and more. He cares about scaleable, systematic growth.

fe /at/ f19n dot com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/franzenzenhofer
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