I used to think the "feature factory" was a fundamentally flawed product culture. Lately, my thinking has shifted and I see the feature factory as an optimal product culture in a sales-led company (likely b2b). Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying it's fun or enjoyable to be a PM in a feature factory. I believe product management in an empowered product culture is more strategic & meaningful work. I'm just skeptical that a sales-minded CEO can truly value an empowered product model. "Sales-led culture" and "empowered product culture" seem philosophically incompatible. Sales-led companies are generally run by a sales-minded CEO. These CEOs want to ship ship ship. They want feature parity with competitions to close deals. They want more check boxes on side-by-side competitor chart. And there's nothing wrong with wanting all of those features! It's the CEO's company and they should run it however they deem necessary in order to win. If they believe a feature factory is the way to win, a feature factory is the right model. The problem is caused by many sales-led companies still evaluating their PMs by empowered product team standards (e.g. driving the strategic direction of their area). PMs in these companies often have feature requests shoved down their throats without no room for strategic work. When PMs inevitably say no to some features, they make enemies internally. When performance reviews come around, they get feedback about being neither collaborative nor strategic. The incompatible sales-led culture and empowered team expectations lead to a lose-lose for PMs trying to keep everyone happy while advancing their own career. So what's the alternative? This might be crazy but I think sales-led companies should embrace the feature factory culture fully; stop evaluating PMs by their strategic contribution (a weight off the PMs shoulders given they never get time for strategic work anyway) and start rewarding PMs based on how many features they ship that the sales leaders care about. This will align the PMs in your org to think and work the way the sales team (and CEO) wants them to work. It'll kill many unhealthy tensions in the org and get people rowing in the same direction. Would I want to work in that environment? Probably not. But most b2b SaaS companies are already sales-led. And there are thousands of PMs in those environments who feel the tension I've described. So I think most b2b SaaS PMs would celebrate their company embracing their feature factory and just calling it what it is. Ultimately, CEO should incentivize their teams to care about what they care about. Design-minded CEOs should incentivize great UX (Airbnb, Linear). Engineering-minded CEOs should incentivize great infra and scale (Meta, DataDog) Just don't try to be something you're not.
Yes, leaders have a profound impact on shaping the product culture within their organizations. A CEO’s background and beliefs can significantly influence whether a company becomes sales-led or product-empowered. However, in my opinion, the key to successful leadership lies in the ability to adapt and align the company’s culture with its strategic goals. CEOs should be clear about their priorities and intentionally cultivate a culture that supports those objectives, whether it’s through incentivizing feature output or fostering innovation.
Yes, Ben leaders have a profound impact on shaping the product culture within their organizations. A CEO’s background and beliefs can significantly influence whether a company becomes sales-led or product-empowered. However, in my opinion, the key to successful leadership lies in the ability to adapt and align the company’s culture with its strategic goals. CEOs should be clear about their priorities and intentionally cultivate a culture that supports those objectives, whether it’s through incentivizing feature output or fostering innovation.
i think this presents a false dichotomy. ultimately every company is a feature factory...who uses products that don't produce new features? other than maybe craigslist i think maybe what you're trying to suss out is who has the best signal on actual customer needs...the engineers, the pms or the sales team. (and in reality, it might be a combination ... not just one) there are some products where the engineer is so close to being the user that they themselves can figure out what to build and how to make it great b/c they know their user will care about that...so they are more empowered (e.g., datadog) on the other extreme...there are some products where the user of the product is not even the buyer and the user needs diverge from the buyer needs. that usually means sales will have a better signal on what's needed to win than a PM or Eng. (e.g., Salesforce) companies also go through different stages, shifting who has the best signal on customer need/demand. when we founded regal, it was me and my cofounder who set the vision and feature sets. as we've matured, expanded our use cases and personas, what we build is now coming from a mix of founder / PMs / CS / sales input, and we just allocate different % of resources to each.
I’d just add one important thing. By all means fully embrace being a feature factory, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong there, but that should mean getting rid of PMs and a “Product” area altogether. If you’re agile you may have someone acting as a PO, but that’s as far as “Product” should be uttered in that environment. If the company strategy is selling features picked by clients, the only internal negotiation needed is making the Tech team commit to a delivery date. Product Managers would only add extra communication steps without adding any value. So proudly say “we’re a feature factory” out loud and stop wasting money (and the PMs time and joy) on Product salaries. Maybe that money can become higher bonuses to the sales or engineering team and we have a win-win-win situation.
The comments to this are conflating sales customer request driven and founder vision driven. Two VERY different patterns of disempowered and often wasted or misaligned PM. I think the latter is still product and a strong enough PM leader can build a bond of trust with a visionary founder and be let in and together do real product but it is very hard. Founder vision driven can be in SLG or PLG or in between. For sales CEO led companies embracing customer feature requests I would challenge the ultimate scale limit of that model. Easier to get to first $, $10M,, maybe scrape $100M if ACV is high enough but beyond that you're going to have to do real product.
I'm with you on the idea of not lying to yourself as an org and optimising for what you actually want to optimise for. I guess the problem is that if you're hiring and rewarding PMs who at the end of the day are just delivery/project managers, you are more likely to end up not just with a bunch of features no one needs (i.e. a feature factory), but also with the *version* of those features that isn't trying to maximise usability, feasibility, and value to the user (i.e. the things an empowered product team would prioritise and focus on building). Instead, you'd have PrjMs pushing to build to spec, and not doing any of the collaborative product discovery work that a PrdM would be doing. Is there a way for sales-led orgs to square this circle? Or are we back at more or less square one - ask your PMs to be delivery managers in a feature factory, which ultimately leads to many of them either leaving or just being super frustrated (albeit in your model they'll hopefully get better perf ratings / bonuses / promotions?)
I think this is the best thing I’ve seen you post. So many thoughts, but I’ll just state one: I don’t think companies need to stop lying to themselves, I think PMs need to. In the interview process you should be interviewing the company back to determine which org “runs” the show. Then ask yourself if you want to play that game.
What a refreshing perspective that clearly gets many people to think. I agree, in the end it’s what you want to optimize for, the one thing I’m not sure about is how in a sales-led feature factory you don’t end up with ‘featuritis’ and a completely overblown portfolio that eventually takes a lot of time to slim down and focus on what matters and has impact/value. If you walk into that knowingly - great, but in that case you really don’t need the full product skillset.
Do you have any example of how embracing this sales culture is working anywhere? A check box race driven by feature parity with competitors is not how you’ll close more deals and win long term. Might work short term to close deals but fundamentally customers evaluate products on more than just a list of features. And for your product to stick, renew with customers, the features and product must address customer needs and be usable, reliable, etc. The challenge is learning to build the right things, the right way at scale. If the sales & product tension is a healthy one it could help with that if not then you have your answer. Overall This doesn’t seem so different from internal product triad tensions, the key to success is how the culture supports this healthy and diverse tension to deliver whats best for customers/the company.
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2moit's important to reiterate that even in a "product led" culture or whatever we want to call it (i.e., the PM's "ideal world"), we don't *ignore* requests from sales. Sometimes those requests are truly needed, and needed right now. Sometimes they are great ideas to put on the backlog and prioritize with other work. Sometimes PM has a way to handle the request to enable the sale to close *without* building anything new. I always want to hear about what customers and prospects are asking for. It's a great source of *data* for the product org.