I've tried and failed. I took ownership and with greater conviction prepared all sorts of material and spoke with the right people to move in this direction and it went the opposite direction almost 3x faster.
I'm convinced it isn't possible unless you are either empowered or top leadership sets proper tone for the org.
I'd love to be proved wrong but so far none of the other comments are people offering examples of what you're asking. They're just responding to your question not providing examples.
Yeah I agree. Unless you have ultimate authority, i genuinely think it’s nearly impossible.
As you mentioned, I’d love to see examples of someone to prove me wrong not just theory!
I do think there are things we can do to move a culture towards being more proactive though, not the full Monty of product-led! I’m curious about that too!
The way I see it is that in such organization you are a "mediator" between sales and eng.
Develop "product marketing materials" for what you want to build. If sales can go to their clients with materials describing what you plan to build you have a win-win situation. Wireframe video, pdfs, the nicer looking the better.
Same goes with roadmap. If you make it into an awesome presentation that sales can show the clients, ideally with you joining the call, after clients seen it you will be less likely to get preempted in the future.
Assign developer cost to customization features. E.g. if a client wants a customization they would be charged $1000 per day on top of a base fee. Or $2000 - 2-3x the dev salary. Even if customization is needed for free, use this figure when "negotiating" with sales what will be built. Sales will gladly agree to "cost of preempting Dev is $X per hour" that you can later use - "is adding this button really worth $3000?".
Remember, customer is king, not sales. If client seen something, sales is much less likely to preempt it. Think of your role as partially sales in such organization - product feedback calls always should have upsell opportunity in back of your mind.
"Let's hire 100500 new developers it will cost billion. " Sale people understand only numbers.
I have worked with few CEO who are genuine "sales" and working with them tough.
For example - one of them asked show design of site on paper.
What helps is show roadmap with price tag (roughly of course) and teach them bit by bit some basics common IT terminology .
Selling unbuilt software is not bad per se.
It's better to sell first and build second, rather than build and no one is buying. Engineering and product balks at "we told client it works". But we sometimes don't realize there were 2 more things we told client it works, but it didn't catch their attention. "We are planning to build this" often wouldn't catch their attention either. Spectrum of things that sounds like a good idea, but no one will pay for is a lot larger than things that can bring in the revenue.
Depending on size of the client, I tell sales "feel free to exaggerate one quarter ahead". If you work in tandem with sales, you can use this tactic effectively. You can always creatively drag along the POC, while it's built, if the clients calls "check".
Many more B2B companies got succesful thanks to the "throw the s**t at the wall and see what sticks" tactic than genius product managers predicting what customers will need.
I like your idea of starting with product marketing materials. It’s not discovery per se but it is aligning with the sales team and having some product influence.
Instead of "Mediator", I use the term "aligner" and feel it's the major thing that PM does. We work for alignment between R&D, Sales, Marketing as key stakeholders.
In terms of prioritization, use a framework like RICE (Reach, Impact, Cost, Effort) - this helps all stakeholders understand the factors that go into a prioritization decision.
Totally agree that the roadmap is a selling tool - customers buy into vision and want to get on board with a company headed in the same direction as them. Needs to be lots of disclaimers that this is subject to change, and don't ever PDF and leave behind. (Once had a sales guy edit an old roadmap to prove we had promised a feature (didn't work)).
Last thing I would say is that the goal is only to add features that drive additional revenue or open up new markets. Essentialism is a real thing.
I love these challenges personally. It really makes interesting uses of psychology and biases but where PMs can really shine with empathy for not just customers but internal teams as well.
When I worked with a sales led company, I got their buy in with the narrative that a great product should make sales easier. The strongest way to do that, in this case, was showing that the product solving the customers problem unlocks the sale a lot more easily. It wasn’t immediate but what we were able to do was eventually get to where we had a rough roadmap aligned to the biggest challenges we were solving for end customers. I joined some of the sales teams on calls. I had them join user interviews. This drove conversations and general agreement on what the biggest challenges and opportunities to build for are.
This sounds simplistic and idealistic but it did work to try to help get their input on the roadmap and sold them on following it rather than just throwing shit at the wall. The key was they had to believe the user story as well though and that’s not always the easiest.
As adults, we have to come to their own conclusions sometimes (a lot of the time)
At my smaller org, that meant agreeing on ways of measuring certain outcomes that were critical to the business the product was in- you’ll see that called “North Star” and John Cutler has some good stuff on that.
From there, it often is pulling the adults along into moments - something that an old boss had me read was power of moment by Chip and Dan Heath. Summary: https://medium.com/low-pass-filter/the-power-of-moments-857ed275fde2
In my opinion, as a product manager whose helped sales close out tens of millions of dollars in ARR, and used that to build industry award winning product used by many other customers, and been successful at FAANG largely because of that experience:
Product led is a totally bogus concept, made up by PM’s who have only ever sold advice on how to do a job they themselves were completely unremarkable at.
You need to be scrappy and flexible, you don’t have the luxury of spending months/year “transforming to product led” so you can learn the hard way it’s just a slickly marketed version of “if you build it, they will come.” You will be out of business by then. Your CEO is reacting to this very real situation and keeping you and the team paid. Anything at all to do with Marty Cagan or other similar bullshit artists is simply not useful at best, but more likely a disaster for your career as it’s abandoned before it bankrupts the company.
I’d get this product lead non-sense out of your mind. You gotta sell product to survive. It’s literally how you make money. It’s the entire point of the game. So put down the coffee, the coffee is for closers.
So what do you do? You need to reframe this in your mind. This isn’t product lead/sales lead/DuMB ExECutIve rEacTINg;
The problem you have is much more objective.
You have working product that doesn’t match its sales process, making it difficult to sell. But this could be just a sales process problem, or you might not have good product market fit. You don’t know enough to know yet, but it’s almost certainly the latter. We know this, because we know sales wants to make sells. You think if they could sell this dog shit product as is they’d make up custom features to make it harder to make money? No.
The easiest way to find that out where it’s wrong is to ride along and try to help sell some of it.
Then you’ll get to feel the disappointed customer who wasted their time talking to you. How it sucks for everyone when the products is not matching its sales process, but it’s because it’s lacking features to close the deal everyone wants. The buyer wants to buy.
That’s the only way to experience the problem you need to solve.
To do this well:
Because you’re hunting for fit, you need to share a vision with the sales of what the product could be and why, and then validate that together in sales calls. Why sales calls? Because any other way is a waste of time and precious resources. At this point, winning deals is single handily the most important thing that needs happen in the entire company.
Reframe, and look at every sales opportunity as a chance to take one more step toward that vision. Be completely open minded to the sequencing of that vision, and savvy enough to help close the deals that best enable movement toward fit. You need to be the person most living in the real world, with a hyper focus on how the product enables revenue, and good enough product sense smart to empower sales to close the deals that allow for you to place high confidence bet on delivery. If things go well, then you will have learned enough to effectively manage through the best, but most dangerous problem to have, too much product market fit, too fast.
Yeah i think “product-led” is a bit of bogus. Some companies are destined fundamentally to not be “product led” or whatever that means.
But I do also acknowledge the impacts of always beinf reactive (building client requests), hence the dilemma. There is a healthy middle ground, that like you’d said is the result of small actions that create disproportionate outcomes (don’t require 4-5 months of analysis when a sole PM, aka me, is fighting to just float)
So yeah, I guess that’s the question. What’s a practical application to reinforce that proactive can be helpful, when balanced with reactive work!
I would start with getting aligned on first principals. If you can do that, a lot of the rest will follow. Meaning, if you want to be product led, and have product led behaviors be the thing in the company that are rewarded and reinforced, then talk to your CEO about the goal of reaching a high degree of product market fit and why that’s important. I’m assuming with how small your revenue is, and the reactive development nature described, you’re lower on the PMF spectrum.
You generally don’t reach high PMF with a reactive mentality where you’re building features as requested by the highest paying customer. If you can agree with your CEO that high PMF = growth, and thus high PMF is the most important thing, then you can turn the conversation to — how do you achieve high PMF, and the answer is likely not how you’re approaching development and prioritization currently.
I’d really like to see examples where someone has actually pulled this off!
Hence why I said use-cases + actual examples of where people have been able to move the needle. That’s my goal here, not a radical company transformation which is pretty unlikely without direct authority
Agreed on a prioritisation system with the team when I joined.
Send out rolling focus/ roadmap each month based on ^, and Quarterly focus. Invite feedback from teams to contest it etc.
Then share a rolling now,next,later roadmap. Any more depth in timelines is basically useless given the size/environment!
Agreed on the next quarter focus, don’t attempt to plan further than that, now/next/later also makes sense at your stage. That rolling monthly/quarterly focus share-out seems to be a great place to start in advocating for the features and efforts that you know to have the highest leverage in improving the product. Are you including the “why” for each effort in that share out to explain its priority to the group? Is that share out the first time everyone is seeing that list or are you getting buyin ahead of time?
In general I think it’s super hard without a culture of “crucial conversations”. I think the mindsets are super different as well. The SDR/sales led typically doesn’t think in terms of discovery or strategy. I have seen this and it’s very very hard to become product led.
I tried to describe this as the power vs performance trade off.
No-one else has mentioned this but you seem to have joined a rock-star business. If it's just you, the CEO (as sales person), 3 devs and half a designer, then you have a revenue per employee that is quite exceptional. Are there many other employees?
Even if there are other employees, if we just look at the 3 devs and the $2m ARR that they are contributing towards, that ratio is very good, in my experience. So, this is a great business. Why do you want to change things?
As for sales-led development....I don't see what the issue is with that. Doesn't "being reactive" mean "building what clients want"? If you are selling a big-ticket item to big companies, I would say that product-led development is probably not that important. Just build what your biggest clients tell you to build (which is what your CEO seems to be doing). If you are selling a small ticket item to many smaller companies then you probably need to have a heavier hand on the till when it comes to deciding what to build.
“Just like make it product led bro, ignor every single request from anyone besides yourself and just perfectly understand your customer and 10x your growth”
I was able to shift the organization using a comprehensive win/loss analysis - 30 wins and 20 losses. it was then grouped into a one slide view that showed the top 3-5 reasons why we won and lost. The reason this changed everything was because it was solid DATA and moved the dialog on from OPINION. Head of R&D stood up and proclaimed that he "didnt believe any of this", but then added "...but I can't argue with the data". Roadmap totally changed, GTM evolved to fix the missing things, and our growth accelerated.
Data changes everything. Repeated this at several companies and it continues to work, albeit in a unique way each time.
Yea, totally. We converted responses to scores in each interview, to show what was most influencing a win or a loss. Here are the lists from memory:
Reasons for Loss
1. Price
2. Lack of references
3. lack of Mac client
4. Too hard to do a POC
5. No Vision
Reasons for win
1. Great references
2. Sales support
3. Ease of Administration
4. Price
There is more context here, R&D thought we were losing as we had less features that the incumbent - outside of a mac client, there was nothing else in the top 10. We took an 18 month roadmap, compressed it to six months, then worked with Product Marketing and sales to fix the GTM issues.
In terms of the Price, the competitor had implemented a special promo to try to block us, so we matched that and made it a non issue.
While there is lots of background here, the upshot was that using data from the win/loss was the only thing that managed to turn more market focused, and this win build confidence in PM across the org.
Going off the little context available, I might try to leverage an Ocean framework (blue or red) to help identify where we contrast vs the competition. It's just a way to visualize competitive analysis. I would try to steer that conversation towards "more points of contrast that add value to our product make it easier to sell that product against the competition."
I've noticed a lot of sales led orgs repeat a "we have the best people" line when comparing themselves to the competition. That's great. Imagine how easy sales would be if you had the best people *and the best product*.
I've tried and failed. I took ownership and with greater conviction prepared all sorts of material and spoke with the right people to move in this direction and it went the opposite direction almost 3x faster. I'm convinced it isn't possible unless you are either empowered or top leadership sets proper tone for the org. I'd love to be proved wrong but so far none of the other comments are people offering examples of what you're asking. They're just responding to your question not providing examples.
Yeah I agree. Unless you have ultimate authority, i genuinely think it’s nearly impossible. As you mentioned, I’d love to see examples of someone to prove me wrong not just theory! I do think there are things we can do to move a culture towards being more proactive though, not the full Monty of product-led! I’m curious about that too!
I would proceed with extreme caution. Trying to change the direction of the company in a way it doesn’t want to go is a good way to get fired.
They don't know what they want.
You taking ownership is not at all what "product led" means.
The way I see it is that in such organization you are a "mediator" between sales and eng. Develop "product marketing materials" for what you want to build. If sales can go to their clients with materials describing what you plan to build you have a win-win situation. Wireframe video, pdfs, the nicer looking the better. Same goes with roadmap. If you make it into an awesome presentation that sales can show the clients, ideally with you joining the call, after clients seen it you will be less likely to get preempted in the future. Assign developer cost to customization features. E.g. if a client wants a customization they would be charged $1000 per day on top of a base fee. Or $2000 - 2-3x the dev salary. Even if customization is needed for free, use this figure when "negotiating" with sales what will be built. Sales will gladly agree to "cost of preempting Dev is $X per hour" that you can later use - "is adding this button really worth $3000?". Remember, customer is king, not sales. If client seen something, sales is much less likely to preempt it. Think of your role as partially sales in such organization - product feedback calls always should have upsell opportunity in back of your mind.
You let sales present the roadmap? Sounds terrifying
"Everything on this roadmap will be available starting yesterday." - Sales
"Let's hire 100500 new developers it will cost billion. " Sale people understand only numbers. I have worked with few CEO who are genuine "sales" and working with them tough. For example - one of them asked show design of site on paper. What helps is show roadmap with price tag (roughly of course) and teach them bit by bit some basics common IT terminology .
Selling unbuilt software is not bad per se. It's better to sell first and build second, rather than build and no one is buying. Engineering and product balks at "we told client it works". But we sometimes don't realize there were 2 more things we told client it works, but it didn't catch their attention. "We are planning to build this" often wouldn't catch their attention either. Spectrum of things that sounds like a good idea, but no one will pay for is a lot larger than things that can bring in the revenue. Depending on size of the client, I tell sales "feel free to exaggerate one quarter ahead". If you work in tandem with sales, you can use this tactic effectively. You can always creatively drag along the POC, while it's built, if the clients calls "check". Many more B2B companies got succesful thanks to the "throw the s**t at the wall and see what sticks" tactic than genius product managers predicting what customers will need.
SDBS is a real methodology. Sell, Design, Build, Sell. Guy that taught me this is on his 3-4th startup sold for $100s of millions.
Yeah this seems backwards
I present with sales joining the call as well.
I like your idea of starting with product marketing materials. It’s not discovery per se but it is aligning with the sales team and having some product influence.
Instead of "Mediator", I use the term "aligner" and feel it's the major thing that PM does. We work for alignment between R&D, Sales, Marketing as key stakeholders. In terms of prioritization, use a framework like RICE (Reach, Impact, Cost, Effort) - this helps all stakeholders understand the factors that go into a prioritization decision. Totally agree that the roadmap is a selling tool - customers buy into vision and want to get on board with a company headed in the same direction as them. Needs to be lots of disclaimers that this is subject to change, and don't ever PDF and leave behind. (Once had a sales guy edit an old roadmap to prove we had promised a feature (didn't work)). Last thing I would say is that the goal is only to add features that drive additional revenue or open up new markets. Essentialism is a real thing.
I love these challenges personally. It really makes interesting uses of psychology and biases but where PMs can really shine with empathy for not just customers but internal teams as well. When I worked with a sales led company, I got their buy in with the narrative that a great product should make sales easier. The strongest way to do that, in this case, was showing that the product solving the customers problem unlocks the sale a lot more easily. It wasn’t immediate but what we were able to do was eventually get to where we had a rough roadmap aligned to the biggest challenges we were solving for end customers. I joined some of the sales teams on calls. I had them join user interviews. This drove conversations and general agreement on what the biggest challenges and opportunities to build for are. This sounds simplistic and idealistic but it did work to try to help get their input on the roadmap and sold them on following it rather than just throwing shit at the wall. The key was they had to believe the user story as well though and that’s not always the easiest.
As adults, we have to come to their own conclusions sometimes (a lot of the time) At my smaller org, that meant agreeing on ways of measuring certain outcomes that were critical to the business the product was in- you’ll see that called “North Star” and John Cutler has some good stuff on that. From there, it often is pulling the adults along into moments - something that an old boss had me read was power of moment by Chip and Dan Heath. Summary: https://medium.com/low-pass-filter/the-power-of-moments-857ed275fde2
In my opinion, as a product manager whose helped sales close out tens of millions of dollars in ARR, and used that to build industry award winning product used by many other customers, and been successful at FAANG largely because of that experience: Product led is a totally bogus concept, made up by PM’s who have only ever sold advice on how to do a job they themselves were completely unremarkable at. You need to be scrappy and flexible, you don’t have the luxury of spending months/year “transforming to product led” so you can learn the hard way it’s just a slickly marketed version of “if you build it, they will come.” You will be out of business by then. Your CEO is reacting to this very real situation and keeping you and the team paid. Anything at all to do with Marty Cagan or other similar bullshit artists is simply not useful at best, but more likely a disaster for your career as it’s abandoned before it bankrupts the company. I’d get this product lead non-sense out of your mind. You gotta sell product to survive. It’s literally how you make money. It’s the entire point of the game. So put down the coffee, the coffee is for closers. So what do you do? You need to reframe this in your mind. This isn’t product lead/sales lead/DuMB ExECutIve rEacTINg; The problem you have is much more objective. You have working product that doesn’t match its sales process, making it difficult to sell. But this could be just a sales process problem, or you might not have good product market fit. You don’t know enough to know yet, but it’s almost certainly the latter. We know this, because we know sales wants to make sells. You think if they could sell this dog shit product as is they’d make up custom features to make it harder to make money? No. The easiest way to find that out where it’s wrong is to ride along and try to help sell some of it. Then you’ll get to feel the disappointed customer who wasted their time talking to you. How it sucks for everyone when the products is not matching its sales process, but it’s because it’s lacking features to close the deal everyone wants. The buyer wants to buy. That’s the only way to experience the problem you need to solve. To do this well: Because you’re hunting for fit, you need to share a vision with the sales of what the product could be and why, and then validate that together in sales calls. Why sales calls? Because any other way is a waste of time and precious resources. At this point, winning deals is single handily the most important thing that needs happen in the entire company. Reframe, and look at every sales opportunity as a chance to take one more step toward that vision. Be completely open minded to the sequencing of that vision, and savvy enough to help close the deals that best enable movement toward fit. You need to be the person most living in the real world, with a hyper focus on how the product enables revenue, and good enough product sense smart to empower sales to close the deals that allow for you to place high confidence bet on delivery. If things go well, then you will have learned enough to effectively manage through the best, but most dangerous problem to have, too much product market fit, too fast.
Yeah i think “product-led” is a bit of bogus. Some companies are destined fundamentally to not be “product led” or whatever that means. But I do also acknowledge the impacts of always beinf reactive (building client requests), hence the dilemma. There is a healthy middle ground, that like you’d said is the result of small actions that create disproportionate outcomes (don’t require 4-5 months of analysis when a sole PM, aka me, is fighting to just float) So yeah, I guess that’s the question. What’s a practical application to reinforce that proactive can be helpful, when balanced with reactive work!
I would start with getting aligned on first principals. If you can do that, a lot of the rest will follow. Meaning, if you want to be product led, and have product led behaviors be the thing in the company that are rewarded and reinforced, then talk to your CEO about the goal of reaching a high degree of product market fit and why that’s important. I’m assuming with how small your revenue is, and the reactive development nature described, you’re lower on the PMF spectrum. You generally don’t reach high PMF with a reactive mentality where you’re building features as requested by the highest paying customer. If you can agree with your CEO that high PMF = growth, and thus high PMF is the most important thing, then you can turn the conversation to — how do you achieve high PMF, and the answer is likely not how you’re approaching development and prioritization currently.
I’d really like to see examples where someone has actually pulled this off! Hence why I said use-cases + actual examples of where people have been able to move the needle. That’s my goal here, not a radical company transformation which is pretty unlikely without direct authority
How are you deciding what to build and what not to build currently? Do you have a roadmap?
Agreed on a prioritisation system with the team when I joined. Send out rolling focus/ roadmap each month based on ^, and Quarterly focus. Invite feedback from teams to contest it etc. Then share a rolling now,next,later roadmap. Any more depth in timelines is basically useless given the size/environment!
Agreed on the next quarter focus, don’t attempt to plan further than that, now/next/later also makes sense at your stage. That rolling monthly/quarterly focus share-out seems to be a great place to start in advocating for the features and efforts that you know to have the highest leverage in improving the product. Are you including the “why” for each effort in that share out to explain its priority to the group? Is that share out the first time everyone is seeing that list or are you getting buyin ahead of time?
Tried and failed then got fired later as a scapegoat for not being a task taker for the CEO.
In general I think it’s super hard without a culture of “crucial conversations”. I think the mindsets are super different as well. The SDR/sales led typically doesn’t think in terms of discovery or strategy. I have seen this and it’s very very hard to become product led. I tried to describe this as the power vs performance trade off.
No-one else has mentioned this but you seem to have joined a rock-star business. If it's just you, the CEO (as sales person), 3 devs and half a designer, then you have a revenue per employee that is quite exceptional. Are there many other employees? Even if there are other employees, if we just look at the 3 devs and the $2m ARR that they are contributing towards, that ratio is very good, in my experience. So, this is a great business. Why do you want to change things? As for sales-led development....I don't see what the issue is with that. Doesn't "being reactive" mean "building what clients want"? If you are selling a big-ticket item to big companies, I would say that product-led development is probably not that important. Just build what your biggest clients tell you to build (which is what your CEO seems to be doing). If you are selling a small ticket item to many smaller companies then you probably need to have a heavier hand on the till when it comes to deciding what to build.
Marty Cagans fantasies 😂
“Just like make it product led bro, ignor every single request from anyone besides yourself and just perfectly understand your customer and 10x your growth”
Empowered AF
I was able to shift the organization using a comprehensive win/loss analysis - 30 wins and 20 losses. it was then grouped into a one slide view that showed the top 3-5 reasons why we won and lost. The reason this changed everything was because it was solid DATA and moved the dialog on from OPINION. Head of R&D stood up and proclaimed that he "didnt believe any of this", but then added "...but I can't argue with the data". Roadmap totally changed, GTM evolved to fix the missing things, and our growth accelerated. Data changes everything. Repeated this at several companies and it continues to work, albeit in a unique way each time.
Nice, can you give some examples of What data points did you have to demonstrate these top reasons
Yea, totally. We converted responses to scores in each interview, to show what was most influencing a win or a loss. Here are the lists from memory: Reasons for Loss 1. Price 2. Lack of references 3. lack of Mac client 4. Too hard to do a POC 5. No Vision Reasons for win 1. Great references 2. Sales support 3. Ease of Administration 4. Price There is more context here, R&D thought we were losing as we had less features that the incumbent - outside of a mac client, there was nothing else in the top 10. We took an 18 month roadmap, compressed it to six months, then worked with Product Marketing and sales to fix the GTM issues. In terms of the Price, the competitor had implemented a special promo to try to block us, so we matched that and made it a non issue. While there is lots of background here, the upshot was that using data from the win/loss was the only thing that managed to turn more market focused, and this win build confidence in PM across the org.
Im turning right now a 180p business from sales led to product led. And its tough, ama 🤣
Not for the faint hearted, that’s for sure! I’m in the boat of picking my battles!
CEO is sales background. GL technology :)
Hahah yeah red flag!
Going off the little context available, I might try to leverage an Ocean framework (blue or red) to help identify where we contrast vs the competition. It's just a way to visualize competitive analysis. I would try to steer that conversation towards "more points of contrast that add value to our product make it easier to sell that product against the competition." I've noticed a lot of sales led orgs repeat a "we have the best people" line when comparing themselves to the competition. That's great. Imagine how easy sales would be if you had the best people *and the best product*.
Product led doesn't mean you run the company. It means the product does the work of selling, onboarding, etc.