Making Everything a Product: A Pragmatic Path to Organizational Performance
Align your organization through a unified product mindset.
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Following up on a recent post I wrote “Why You Should Think Of Everything As A Product". To recap, when platforms, services, and capabilities also adopt a product mindset, they become directly accountable for delivering value. This breaks down silos, tightens governance, and provides clearer success metrics across the organization. While these benefits are compelling, some may argue this approach is too idealistic or impractical at scale. However, I've seen how large, complex organizations can reap tremendous gains by elevating everything to be product-driven.
Since this post I have been having further conversations with leaders at all levels across several industries, from enterprises, B2B SaaS, Retail, FSI and more. I’ve been pleased to see that despite some initial challenges, everyone is aligned on one key fact, products should understand their customer needs, and more things from workshops to platforms could be more impactful when classified as products.
One of many examples I share in these debates was where I was recently working with and researching a large retailer in EMEA. The symptom that caused the analysis in the first place was that the leadership team was concerned that there was increasing engineering spending against a decline in customer satisfaction and agility with lower scores on internal platform consumption despite increased platform-related spending.
When analyzing their portfolio over a 12-month period, it was observed that an increasing number of platforms were being built. Diving deeper into this and interviewing the product and platform leaders, it became apparent that there was a key driver behind this trend. Products required more governance around ROI and customer value than platforms to be commissioned and supported.
As a result, new ideas were being pitched more as platforms that didn’t have the same customer-centric rigor as customer-facing products. So large platforms were being built on technology-driven strategies alone, not engaging with or being accountable to ROI or internal consumers, ultimately degrading the customer experience and increasing the complexity and value delivered. By redefining governance to apply the same level of rigour for platforms as for products, this approach effectively curbed the trend, resulting in improved margins, decreased costs per idea validation, reduced waste and increased platform adoption. Could this be happening in your organisation? Do you have strong enough data and portfolio governance to even notice this?
This example shows how taking a product approach can scale across a large, complex business. When every team embraces customer-centricity and value accountability - not just those building end-user products - it drives better decisions and outcomes company-wide. Moreover, elevating everything to be product-driven establishes a common language and set of standards.
Aligning Around Value And Customers
Suddenly, people from all parts of the organization can engage in aligned conversations on delivering value. They have shared metrics and governance models to rally behind. This enables greater collaboration and transparency to serve customers. At the heart of this shift is recognizing that customers don't distinguish between your products, platforms, and services. They simply seek valuable outcomes from your business. So your operating model shouldn't make such distinctions either.
Adopting this unified product approach does require changes in leadership, structure, and culture. Leaders must advocate for it and model the behaviors. Organizational structures need to dissolve rigid silos and foster cross-functional teams. And culture must emphasize customer obsession, value creation, and outcome ownership for every product and team. The good news is that small steps can catalyze enormous impact.
As teams start adopting product practices, it often creates a ripple effect. For instance, a platform team begins sharing actionable customer insights. Other teams find this so useful that they start gathering customer feedback too. Steadily, product thinking proliferates. And once the flywheel spins faster, the momentum is hard to stop.
When product teams share roadmaps and OKRs and KPI’s, new synergies emerge. People become more invested in collective outcomes versus just their domain. Customer-centricity becomes viral, as teams experience how this focus on value benefits everyone.
Far from being idealistic, this unified approach delivers concrete results. As the retail example shows, customer satisfaction, cost-efficiency, innovation velocity all improve. Teams gain more autonomy and accountability to experiment and deliver value quickly. So view elevating everything as a product as a pragmatic path to performance, not just philosophy. It systematically removes waste and aligns efforts to what matters most - your customers. The outcome is a cohesive, empowered organization that continuously delivers value.