[kyriee]

Product-led typically means "driven by customer needs" but also being able to make the correct trade-offs vis a vis engineering and sales considerations. That is, delivering something that is in line with what you can build and not delivering "value" that the customer is not ready to pay for.

Which can be opposed to "sales driven" where the sales team sold something, engineering has to play catch up, which can lead to technical debt and lack of focus mid-term.

Or engineering led, where the engineering team will decide priorities and might push cool tech demos that will never become successful products. Google being the best example of this type of culture.

Edit: article is terrible. He creates strawmans to sell his wares. As always, beware of consultant blogs.

[Closi]

You are describing customer-led IMO.

Product led is about building the best product, with the “best” taking into account customer wants.

But product is just one dimension of customer needs, and customer needs are fulfilled across all other departments either directly or indirectly. A sales-led company can still be driven by customer needs, so the definition is way too broad.

Also the statement that “product led” means “making the correct trade off between sales/engineering” is too broad. You could just as easily say “sales/engineering led” means “having the correct mix of product”.

[crazygringo]

I'm not @kyriee but I agree with them.

There's no such thing as "customer-led". That's not a common term, or when it's used it's used so generically as to mean pretty much everything.

"Product led" describes specifically what a "product manager" is hired to do -- make trade-offs primarily between engineering and sales (as well as take into consideration management priorities and general user satisfaction, but user satisfaction is only one priority out of many -- and often not the top one, either).

And if "sales-led" or "engineering-led" resulted in business success then product managers wouldn't exist, because they wouldn't be needed. But sales and engineering often have very conflicting priorities, and would result in drastically different products if left to their own devices.

Hence, product-led.

[Closi]

Meeting customer needs across the value chain is how all companies make money, so calling that ‘product-led’ seems pointless to me.

> If sales-led or engineering-led resulted in business success then product managers wouldn’t exist

By this same logic, I should find that sales managers and engineering managers don’t exist in a world where ‘product-led’ leads to business success.

But of course they do, because everyone adds or creates value and contributes to business success.

[crazygringo]

You don't seem to be understanding what I'm saying at all. Let me try again.

Sales managers specifically focus on sales, they manage internally and have people underneath them. Similarly, engineering managers focus on engineering, manage internally and have people underneath them.

Product managers don't have people underneath them, they don't have reports (except for other product managers). It's a fundamentally different position that is explicitly cross-departmental.

And the idea of product managers existing without sales/engineering managers is nonsensical. Who would they talk to in those departments then?

Of course everybody tries to add value. But the point here is that product management is the only position that is explicitly cross-departmental, precisely to prevent departments from making decisions that seem to make sense internally but don't for the company as a whole.

Because experience shows that, without product managers, departments often do make decisions that make sense for the department but don't for the business as a whole.

At very small companies, the founder/CEO is often the de-facto product manager, but once you reach a certain scale you need to hire product managers to handle all the lateral communications and decisions, while the CEO focuses on things at the top.

Does that makes sense now?

[Closi]

I am understanding, I am disagreeing. I've worked at both "product-oriented" and "non product-oriented" companies, including as a product manager, and what you are saying applies to both.

> But the point here is that product management is the only position that is explicitly cross-departmental, precisely to prevent departments from making decisions that seem to make sense internally but don't for the company as a whole.

At non product-oriented companies, companies still have cross-departmental roles. This is sometimes a singular function (called something like central planning, pmo e.t.c.), but can also sit in cross-functional meetings for heads of departments, or sometimes there are divisional strategy teams which then meet, negotiate and divide back.

> At very small companies, the founder/CEO is often the de-facto product manager, but once you reach a certain scale you need to hire product managers to handle all the lateral communications and decisions, while the CEO focuses on things at the top.

Product Managers at large companies do not facilitate all lateral communications. They facilitate lateral discussions to and from product, for example between "logistics and product", or between "sales and product".

They won't facilitate the discussion between logistics and sales (i.e. "we need a bigger warehouse in 3 years"), or between retail and logistics ("your delivery is late") for instance (which requires other cross-departmental collaboration and planning).

> And the idea of product managers existing without sales/engineering managers is nonsensical. Who would they talk to in those departments then?

Exactly! All I mean is you can't use proof that product managers exist as proof that a company is product-oriented. I've worked in a company that wasn't product oriented that had product managers, and they still added plenty of value :)

My view is that you can have a product-oriented company without having any product managers, because product-orientation isn't to do with any of this stuff. It's to do with the company setting its primary goal to make the best product (i.e. making better things than competitors). It's the focus on building products that's the different thing, not the focus on customer or reducing silos.

As an example, an outsourcing cleaning contract company will not be product oriented, but will be customer oriented and will have an organisational structure that allows cross-departmental communication. They could also still have product owners and a 'product-led' IT division for instance.

[kyriee]

I'm in agreement with pretty much everything @crazygringo has said.

I don't know if this will help, but if I can offer a clarification on why I think product-led id not synonymous to "customer-led" or "market led" is that it's not simply finding and responding to market demands.

You have different types of product managers (f. ex. I am kind of excluding "technical product managers" from this characterization), but typically, product needs to own and understand what customers want BUT be able to understand the tradeoffs, factor in what delivering that value actually entails* AND assess the opportunity cost of pursuing these features vs 1 000 000 possible ideas.

This is typically not the job of sales managers, engineering managers or marketing managers, etc. So product is the function that uses market demands + input from all these other managers, gets buy-in and then helps things go smoothly.

* Building a feature is only part of the cost of a feature. It has to be marketed, it has to be maintained, it has to be improved, etc.