The biggest factor for product success
Throughout my nearly two decades in Product Management, I’ve witnessed both the triumphs of successful products and the challenges of struggling ones. In many cases, products faltered not because of poor teams or inadequate resources, but due to the lack of decision-making empowerment within the teams. Instead of being able to decide what to build, teams were often occupied with implementing features they were simply instructed to build. Although they understood what was truly important for the product's success, they didn’t have the bandwidth to focus on these priorities. Leadership often had different directives, or the essential features didn’t align with the ‘roadmap’ that had been previously agreed upon. More frequently, these features didn’t contribute to the OKRs that the team would ultimately be evaluated against.
Why does this happen? The root cause of this is Product Management processes and organizational structures that have not adapted to modern product building practices.
Let’s look at these two aspects in more detail.
Product Management processes
Some of the management processes that hinder product teams are:
Rigid Pre-Planned Roadmaps: When management imposes a rigid, pre-planned roadmap for the quarter, it can limit a product team’s ability to focus on features that drive key metrics. In an Agile environment, even roadmap decisions should be flexible, driven by experimentation and informed by customer signals to quick prototypes. Unlike product teams, leadership often lacks deep understanding of customers, competitors, and rapidly shifting market conditions necessary for effective roadmap decisions. As a result, teams may be directed to implement well-meaning features that ultimately see low customer adoption.
Lack of Strategic Guidance: I have also seen the other extreme, where the product teams receive absolutely no guidance or strategic direction to decide what to build or where to focus. They just keep churning out features based on recent customer requests or the hot topic of the day. This is often a sign of poor Product Management leadership.
So what kind of management processes should leadership focus on? In my consulting practice I work with leadership in building the following key ingredients of a successful product management structure for companies:
Metrics driven planning: Quarterly planning should be based on key metrics that the product needs to achieve. The plan should not dictate what features to build, but should focus on the metrics to achieve. This is important as most of the time leadership hands over a pre-planned feature list to the team which restricts the team’s flexibility and creativity in meeting the goals. Some examples of good metric focussed goals include “Increase Net Revenue Retention by three percentage points”; “Improve activation rate by half a percentage point”; etc.
Positioning driven planning: What about features that should be built in the product? Who should decide what features to build? In a highly competitive environment, feature decisions also need to be highly decentralized. I.e. The product team needs to make these decisions as they are best positioned to experiment and adjust feature success based on customer behavior. But product teams need to be provided broad guardrails so that their feature decisions don’t jeopardize product positioning. Examples of positioning guidelines include: “UX simplicity is more important than providing complex features to pro-users”; “primary target customer persona is xyz”; “Only target market is Europe”.
Organizational Structure
Granting decision-making autonomy to product teams requires ensuring they have the necessary experience and knowledge to make sound product decisions. This demands thoughtful planning of the product team’s organizational structure. Here are key elements to consider when building a product team capable of making high-quality decisions:
Experienced Product Team Leader Experience is invaluable in product management. Having a seasoned product leader who can make critical decisions is the foundation for delegating control to the team. It’s not enough to hire an experienced CPO or Head of Product and overlook strong leadership at the product level—particularly if your company manages multiple products. For core products, it's essential to have at least a Principal Product Manager or Senior Manager Product in place to lead the team effectively.
Product Operations Support Often, for the product team leader, strategic decision-making gets overshadowed by operational tasks such as running standups, reviewing designs and releases, instrumenting data, and building dashboards. The most successful product teams have other dedicated individuals to handle these operational responsibilities, freeing up the product leader to focus on high-level strategy and metrics. This role is often that of a Product Owner, Associate Product Manager, or Product Operations Manager depending on the seniority. Whatever the title, it's critical to have more than one product person on the team to ensure strategic decisions aren’t bogged down by daily operations.
CPO or Head of Product A skilled CPO or Head of Product is essential for translating company goals—such as revenue and customer acquisition targets—into a cohesive strategy with actionable product metrics for each product team leader. In some cases, this role can be filled by a Founder or another leadership team member. However, when founders or leadership lack product management experience, an experienced product consultant can step in to bridge this gap.
Conclusion
The solution for achieving product excellence (setting up the right Product Management processes and organizational structures) is not very straightforward as it requires mindset change and thoughtful planning. Many founders and leaders in my experience are hesitant to give up control and don’t trust their own teams enough to make crucial product decisions. This prevents the team from incorporating learning from experimentation and customer insights early into the product which is crucial for competitive product building. Brining experience into crucial product roles and setting up the right OKRs can help accelerate product success in competitive industries.
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About
Teja Vepakomma has two decades of experience in startups as well as Fortune 500 companies in product leadership roles. He now consults full-time. Get in touch with Teja using the contact form or via LinkedIn.
