How To Evolve Into A ‘Product-Led’ Organization

SVP of Product at Artera, a SaaS patient communications company. I’m passionate about solving, building & empowering.

I’ve had the pleasure of working at multiple startups of varying sizes. One consistent challenge I’ve seen is the pivot from being a sales-led organization to becoming product-led. Many startups experience this transformation as they start nailing product market fit and are ready to scale.

It’s a critical inflection point for a startup and one that I am passionate about. It requires a fundamental mindset shift from building a product that serves the market needs of today to building a product for the market needs of the future.

The transformation to product-led growth requires a change not just in R&D teams but across the full company—sales, customer experience, partnerships, marketing and more. It’s truly a mindset shift that impacts the whole company. Evolving into this model takes time, collaboration and, above all else, partnership.

I joined Artera in 2021 to lead Product. Since then, Artera has been (and still is) evolving to become a product-led organization.

For other startups in the midst of this transformation or see it on the horizon, the below tips outline how to evolve into a product-led model and will set you up for continued growth.

1. Involve stakeholders early and often.

There are three phases to transformation—each involving different stakeholders, objectives and tactics. Be very intentional about which stakeholders to engage and when to ensure consensus is built among each group before layering on the next.

In our case, we identified three groups of stakeholders: direct team members, the leadership team and the entire company, including all employees. Throughout the evolution of our team, there was one overlaying theme: Internal stakeholders are paramount to building a product-led culture, but the connection to the customer is equally important. That’s why we also started having more direct and regular conversations with customers—listening to what their problems were and watching them interact with our product. External stakeholders can help you to refocus on solving problems versus building features.

Direct Team

Direct team members are critical stakeholders in co-creating the product-led philosophy and approach based on industry best practices.

In our case, our engineering and product teams aligned by reading a book called Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan. The book is about how to create a successful operating model that is product-led. Not only is Marty Cagan a well-known Silicon Valley product guru, but reading his book also gave us a shared language. We created a vision of what it meant to be a product-led organization and our path to get there.

Leadership

Make sure to engage your leadership team and share this product-led vision co-created by the direct team. At my company, we also read another book by Marty Cagan called Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products and discussed the book at a leadership offsite. The book is about building and leading empowered teams, which would serve as the foundation for true organizational transformation. We aligned around what it means to build empowered teams, for engineering and product, but also across the company.

Our entire leadership team committed to building empowered teams and empowered leaders. We also discussed how moving to a product-led model doesn’t mean the product team leads everything; it means our entire organization must be committed to building an amazing product that delivers enormous value to our customers and builds equity—in the long run, not just tomorrow or next week.

2. Empower your team.

We renamed our engineering and product teams to the “Innovation Organization” (IO), illustrating our dedication to innovation. Then, we evolved the IO into an empowered team based on the triad model, meaning our nimble, focused teams would be set up to solve real customer problems autonomously. But we didn’t wait for this new approach to roll out before exercising empowerment strategies for our teams.

Empowered teams cannot wait. Throughout this process, your team should have a voice in shaping your product-led growth strategy and rolling it out.

The team should play an active role in the following.

• Creating a new shared language: Redefine old language into new product-led language.

• Building product-focused training: Empower fellow employees on the new product-led strategy and its impact.

• Connecting with customers: Without direct interaction with customers, you won’t know what to build, so having this close connection is imperative.

Today, our IO is composed of empowered champions of the product-led strategy, not because someone asked them to do it but because they helped co-create it.

3. Maintain ongoing dialogue.

When it comes to organizational transformation, the role of communication cannot be undervalued. Open, consistent and authentic communication is critical to keep employees informed, engaged and inspired to help usher in new change. Once stakeholders are aligned, you need to unveil the product-led vision to the company. Your goal should be to open the lines of communication between the technical teams and all employees.

We recently launched a monthly virtual “IO Lab” where anyone from the company can hear about what’s happening in IO (product and engineering) and how it impacts our customers; we dedicated 100% of a monthly lab to discussing this new approach, including visual storytelling, new organization charts, customer stories and welcomed questions.

These IO Lab meetings have strong attendance by company employees and always end with a Q&A. We use this time to answer questions and glean a better understanding of what employees want to hear about. You should consider holding similar meetings.

Looking Back

If I could tell myself something before I started this journey, I would tell myself to listen, listen and then listen some more. Good listening is very hard but is vital to this type of transformation to ensure varying perspectives are heard and incorporated.

In closing, I’ll share a quote from Inspired: “Winning products come from the deep understanding of the user’s needs combined with an equally deep understanding of what’s just now possible.”

I wholeheartedly agree, and I’ll add to it: I believe building a product-led organization comes from a deep understanding of your teammates, combined with a whole lot of listening.

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