How I Got Converted To Product-Led

Eighteen months ago I got converted to product-led in about ten minutes. Everything since has been harder, and I'd still choose it again tomorrow.

Before that I'd spent four years trying to make DevOps work in an enterprise that wasn't built for it. Two funding mechanics touched the same software but were never designed to share work between them. We tried things, and we made progress, but it was slow. Not because anyone was wrong. Because the organisation, underneath all of it, organised itself around the team. So many people for run, so many funded for new investments, here's the work, go make it fit. The team was the unit. The work flowed past it.

And the harder question never quite landed. What is this thing we're running, end to end, and who actually owns it?

A meeting I dropped into

Late 2024. A couple of my direct reports organised a session to present product-led as a possible new way of working for the Platforms development teams. We were already trying to do it, sort of, in the way you do when you've heard the language but haven't actually changed anything underneath. I wasn't running the meeting. I dropped into it.

I don't remember the first ten minutes. I remember the moment they said the name. Product-led. My brain was firing. That was the frame I'd been missing for the four years before.

Something about how I work. I'm not a by-the-book person and I never have been. Frameworks don't hold my attention. What grabs me is a principle that fits the organisation I'm actually in. So I didn't care, in that meeting, how the consultancy framed product-led, what their structure recommendations were, or what their delivery model looked like. I cared about the principle. Organise around the product. Make that the unit. Make everything else fit around it.

Once you do that, you look at the product end to end. You know what its purpose actually is, not just that it's been running for years. You're willing to own it, look after it, and decommission it when the time comes.

I've described it since as DevOps 2.0. Every Dev-something framing I'd worked with before still kept the function as the unit. DevOps. DevSecOps. BizDevOps. Each one says: you are dev, I am ops, you are sec, here's the room we share. Product-led, properly held, says something different. There's no dev side and ops side. There's the product, and the people who own it. You are the product. I am the product. We are all the product.

The harder problem

I left that meeting fully converted, and I thought naively that was the hard part done.

It wasn't. The hard part started the first time we introduced the concept outside the transformation group. People who'd invested in SAFe and built real expertise around it. People in operations who'd been through enough change programmes to be careful with new framings, especially energetic ones. Both groups had good reasons for where they were. They just hadn't had the meeting I'd had.

And there I was, fully converted, with a passion that was probably getting in the way as much as it was helping. I could see the shape of it so clearly and I couldn't see why other people couldn't. That's the trap of conviction. You assume the thing that converted you will convert everyone else, and when it doesn't, you push harder. Pushing harder makes it worse.

This is still where we are today. Every time we widen the circle, the same dynamic plays out. Conviction does not transfer at the speed it forms.

What I had to learn

The people I needed to win over right then weren't the strategic leaders at the top. They'd seen enough industry signals to nod along. The harder maturity work was further down, with the people who'd have to translate the principle into daily decisions without quietly reshaping it to fit their own style. The Head of Product and the enablement layer underneath. They were the ones who'd have to make this live and breathe at the tactical and operational level. The people who'd argue, every cycle, for protected capacity and translate budget-cycle reality into product work without breaking the product.

If they don't believe in it, the model has the words and none of the substance. If they do believe in it but I haven't held back enough to let them shape it themselves, they're carrying my conviction instead of their own. Conviction that isn't your own doesn't hold up under pressure.

So the work, after the conversion, was learning to hold the principle without crowding the practice. Making space for other people to find the same thing in their own way, on their own timing. Trusting that if the principle is right, other people will arrive at it more durably than if I'd dragged them. That's harder for me than the four-year DevOps fight ever was. I'm a passionate person and holding back is not my natural mode.

Why I'm still in it

We officially launched the change on November 1st, 2025. Six months in. Every product team is established and there's still a lot to work out. The handover and service rituals that don't fit the model anymore but haven't been replaced yet. The decision rights that need redrawing. The cultural muscle of putting the product first, rather than the team first, is still being built.

In a way, that's the point. The organisation is itself the product, and we're running it end to end. When is something like that ever really done? You don't finish a product. You keep meeting it where it is.

And I believe in it now more than ever. I'd choose it again, every time. Once you organise around products, the rest of the operating model has somewhere to land. Funding has somewhere to flow. Decisions have someone to land with. Capabilities have someone to look after them, end to end, over time. Product-led isn't the cleanest model because it's elegant. It's the cleanest because everything else in the organisation can finally find its shape around it.

And there's an honest part I want to keep close. Leaders nodding along is not leaders matured into the model. Strategic vision, tactical translation, and operational reality each mature at their own pace, and keeping all three aligned is the actual work. Six months in, the gap between conviction and maturity is real, and I don't want to sugar-coat it.

Patience with that gap is what keeps us in it.

More to come in this series. The next is about what I'd protect first if I were standing up product-led from scratch.