How to Innovate in a Sales Led Feature Factory
As a product manager, I want to learn how to innovate in an org where I sales leader dictates my roadmap, so I can protect my job and not become demoralized.
To understand a company’s identity, look at the background of the person in charge.
All great businesses start with a vision of a founder who saw a path toward Product/Market fit.
How that founder navigates their way to a profitable, scaled company defines its DNA. The path to legitimacy is forged one step at a time, driven by the founders. They hire people complementary to their work styles. They double down on their strengths. They pursue solutions in their wheelhouse of expertise.
This can be observed in the most iconic companies of today.
Long after the death of Steve Jobs, Apple continues to hold great design and aesthetics as paramount.
Meta, in the spirit of founder Mark Zuckerberg, has a deeply technical product culture. They contribute to multitudes of open-source architectures, advancing the societal technology landscape. Zuck, still like in his Harvard dorm room days, is a builder at heart.
The background of the founder and leader of a company will define not what the company pursues, but how they will pursue it. Either consciously or unconsciously.
This fact was central to a long conversation
Marty discusses a hot-button topic - the Feature Factory Vs. Empowered Product Team approach companies take towards Product Management.
In the Feature Factory model, PMs are prescribed the exact features they are responsible for developing. The job becomes executing those features to satisfy the needs of existing users.
In the Empowered Product Team model - PMs are sent off to address a problem area for existing and/or potential users. They are given more freedom to experiment. It’s a creative process, with permission to pursue unique, out-of-the-box solutions. The focus in on outcomes.
Marty believes that Feature Factory PMs are not long for this world. It’s a focus in his new book, Transformed. In it, Marty focuses on companies undergoing a transition from the Feature Factory to the Empowered Product model. It’s an ambitious cause pursued with this book.
One critical element to succeed in transforming, highlighted by Marty, is attaining CEO buy-in. In Feature Factory type companies, the CEO is usually not a product person. They go on to discuss Lenny's former Product Management employer, Airbnb. They have a product-empowered culture baked into its DNA, because its founder & CEO, Brian Chesky, is himself a product person. Airbnb doesn’t even employ a CPO - Brian acts in the role.
It’s common at non-Silicon Valley / non-Tech-First companies that a finance and sales person helms the role of CEO. It’s in these structures that the Feature Factory model takes hold.
This makes sense. A Sales leader knows what customers want to buy - so they tell their product people to make exactly that!
Marty speaks to how, to embrace a culture change, and a shift to a product-empowered model, the CEO must be bought in.
Marty, as a consultant, naturally gets brought in when there’s real pain. The need for change is obvious.
But what for all those PMs with Sales leaders who want to innovate, but their leaders are not at the point of demanding change?
I’m here to explain how to do just that.
Innovating in a sales-first culture can be done. To succeed, however, It needs to be executed consistent with the Sales DNA that built the company.
You must understand the beast to tame it.
How a Sales Driven Org Becomes a Feature Factory
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There’s a high-mindedness to product management. We are trying to get inside the heads of our users.
A product person aims to understand the real-world problems of people. They then utilized modern technology to solve those problems in ways previously infeasible.
The Silicon Valley model to solving such problems conduces itself to a product-empowered approach. Technical founders themselves build the first version of the product. They then have a war chest of raised funds, allowing them to operate at a deficit in the name of winning market share.
Innate in this approach is spending BIG money on software development. This lends itself well to innovation. The pressure is to deliver solutions that can scale disrupt an (often) archaic industry. In success, they gain monopolistic power over the market.
Let’s discuss Airbnb once more.
Their goal was a thriving marketplace for rooms / homes to rent. This requires both scale of both users in need of sleep accommodations AND homeowners to make their real estate available to rent. Along the way, they had to wade through a hornet’s nest of laws for endless local municipalities.
For this ambitious mission, they raised over $6 billion in funding.
Airbnb was a MASSIVE bet. It’s leader, Brian Chesky, was a Product Designer by trade. He literally made his apartment the very first Airbnb.
They are a Product-led company, through and through.
Sales-led companies have a founder who convinces a cohort of people or businesses to buy something new.
Sometimes they’ve cobbled together a working version considered good enough to complete the value prop of the goods sold.
Sometimes, the product doesn’t exist yet! The sales leader figures out how to make the thing only after someone agrees to pay for it.
In sales-led organizations, this is how new products come to be. Someone discovers a solution someone else is willing to pay for, and then the tech team builds said product.
It’s natural to see how this morphs into a feature factory. Instead of selling a core product, salespeople start promising things not yet built. The product team then has its roadmap become a deliverable list of expensive client solutions.
The sales-focused CEO does not want you to ruminate on big problems with undefined solutions. They want you to deliver a specific set of features that they know they can sell.
The roadmap becomes a long list of things clients asks. For all you bright-eyed PMs dreaming of revolutionizing industry - this can be demoralizing.
All is not lost, my feature factory PMs. You’re going about it wrong.
You need to speak the same language as your sales leaders to innovate.
How To Innovate Within a Sales-Led Framework
The most important rule of a sales-led company is what makes money is king.
Executive buy-in centers around the biggest whale of clients, and what they want to spend on.
In this model, you must think like a businessman in how you approach the roadmap. It does not matter how brilliant or innovative an idea is for it to get pursued. What matters is the perception that clients want it, and money will be made.
Enterprise Client Demand = Making Money
Think about your company’s most valuable clients. The most popular roadmap candidates will be those that resonate with the key stakeholders involved with said clients.
For any idea you wish to pursue, you should position as servicing the needs of a high profile clients. As a PM in such an org (or any company, really), you must cultivate relationships with client stakeholders of the biggest clients.
These individuals will be the testing ground for any innovative idea you wish to pursue. Get that client’s buy-in, and you’ll observe how all those executives suddenly believe in an idea that couldn’t care less previously.
Think of these client relationships as advocates for your ideas. One popular strategy is to establish a client council of key client stakeholders. You give them the venue to be candid with their needs that you meet with quarterly. In return for their time, they receive outsized representation in your roadmap. In these calls, listen to their pain points. Addressing these is where you’ll have the runway to innovate.
The principle: Start ideation in servicing the persona of the client your Sales Leader most wants to sell to.
This approach will keep your efforts grounded in a space far more likely to get buy-in down the road.
The key to success in Sales-Led companies is to know the client pains better than the sales team. When you stumble upon an idea worth pursuing, you introduce it as: here’s an idea that thas the interest of <INSERT VALUABLE KEY CLIENT EVERYONE WANTS HAPPY. >
The key to this approach? In practice, it’s great product work. You stealman your roadmap candidates with legitimate client interest and quantitative evidence. A critic who claims an idea cannot be sold can shut down a PM, but when it’s a client, it’s a whole different story.
Done well, you work closely with your sales team in these efforts. Find an Account Executive counterpart tuned in to the needs of your clients. Ideate with them on solutions to real market problems. Do this well and you’ll quickly make a name for yourself at the company.
Some of my best products ever delivered useful for the entire book of business were adopted due to the pain of one critical client.
I’ve worked hand in hand with the seller or account manager to price these solutions and to get more company resources. pricing strategy and to get the resources.
What starts as an MVP for a key client often evolves into a full-blown productized solution. They naturally fall into the roadmap without much of a discussion as all due to multiple teams - not just product and tech - knowing their importance.
In a sales-led org, you want to be a step ahead of all other org on the wants and pains of your most valuable clients.
Then, when its time to execute, you work hand in hand with the sales leaders that have clout in your company. Product Management is a team sport
Done right, you’ll skip steps and get the bigger checks in your career.
Stuck in a feature factory?
Unable to get your features adopted in the roadmap?
Management not trusting you to do what needs to be done?
Let a Product Veteran help you find the winning path through. Take advantage of P2P services - and book a consult call with bowtiedwhitebelt today.
No matter what the problem, there’s a solution to be had.