Recently, I met with a CEO of a B2B business that was struggling with top-line growth. The product organisation was struggling with perceived low performance and staff burnout.
The Challenge
On the surface, the organization was nicely set up with product teams and trios with a focus on product-led growth (PLG). As the CEO and I reviewed the business metrics and the operational setup, it became clear that the product organization was squeezed between a technical organization led by an experienced CTO and an aggressive sales organization led by an ambitious CSO.
The CTO had been challenged by a legacy platform that could not scale. He had been forced to spend 18 months building what was essentially a new platform. In parallel, the CSO was targeted with a mission to make the organization break even and profitable.
During the platform rebuild, the product team had been managing the backlogs with acceptance from the leadership team that growth would follow. However, when I broke down the product operating model, it became clear that the product team had adopted a model of generating requirements from customer support tickets and requests from the sales organization.
Not surprisingly, the product team could not turn the growth expectations of management into reality. On one hand, the team was fixing UX issues for existing customers, while on the other hand creating one-off features for specific prospects in the hope that the sales organization could close more deals.
The root cause of the product operating model issues was an inexperienced, internally promoted VP of Product who had not managed the leadership transformation required from platform rebuild to product growth. The organization was building plenty of features, but they were not tied to the growth of the business and spread way too thinly to have the impact required. In short, product development had turned into a classic feature factory.
The Solution
After diagnosing these issues with the CEO, I recommended a three-pronged approach:
Product Leadership Coaching: Turning a negative reinforcing loop into a positive one is not easy, so we decided to work with the inexperienced VP of Product on how he sets up a product framework of OKRs, work with data insights, motivates/leads his team, and share progress across the organisation. The aim is to regain confidence in product-led growth, improve the relationship with sales and customer support, and eventually deliver the required growth as a team..
Product Strategy: Recreate the product strategy with a focus on the actual user journeys from onboarding to conversion to upsell and retention with a focus on key aha-moments. Break down the user journeys into agreed strategic initiatives and KPIs to drive growth. The aim of the strategy rework is a shared understanding with the CTO and CCO on a common set of OKRs. The CTO needs to commit to a shift from platform-mode to product-mode in allocation of resources.
Product Discovery: Set up methods for engaging with customers and market data with the aim of designing the strategic initiatives above. Get early wins through fast iterations on focus KPIs, while building the pipeline of follow-up initiatives and alternative paths. This is a cultural shift for the product organization that gradually needs to build up multiple customer resources/data points, define multiple strategic initiatives, and share progress across the organization in parallel.
The Outcome
The outcome remains to been seen, but it is worth noting that it is not uncommon for Danish B2B companies to hire or promote inexperienced product leaders into senior positions. While this brings energy and often great design, business acumen, strategic insight, and product operating modelling often suffer greatly. These are skills that require experience. You can of course accelerate mastery with proper coaching and development.
All B2B companies deserve strong product leaders that can work with sales, customer service, and the technical organisation to deliver the required business results.
