Great Doesn't Mean Copying a Product Operating Model — Building Your Own Vision of What Good Looks Like

The Conversation That Matters

Every leadership team eventually says it: "We need to change how we build product." The words land the same way every time. There's nodding. There's agreement. And then silence — because no one actually knows what that means for this organization, with these constraints, doing this work.

Most teams try to fill that silence by looking outward. They study how other organizations do it. They pull apart product operating models from companies they admire, and then they try to transplant that picture directly into their own context. The structure lands, but it doesn't take root. Teams implement the boxes without understanding the thinking underneath. When pressure comes — and it always does — the system breaks because no one actually owns it.

But here's what matters: looking outward isn't the problem. The problem is stopping there. Inspiration is smart. Learning from how others have solved similar problems is essential. The mistake is treating their answer as your answer. Your constraints are different. Your strengths are different. Your organization is different.

So instead of copying, you translate. You look at how others think about alignment, team structure, value creation, leadership. You ask: what does that look like for us? And critically — that conversation can't stay in the leadership team. It has to cascade so that area leaders and product teams understand not just the shape of the new way, but the thinking behind it. That's what makes it yours.

The Problem With Organizations That Don't Know What Good Looks Like

Some organizations are so far inside their own ways of working that they genuinely don't have a reference point. They've heard about product operating models, but they can't picture what one would actually feel like in their context. Technology is siloed from product. Design is loosely coupled — brought in at the end to "make it look good." Features get requested by sales or managers, built without validation, and shipped without learning anything useful. Discovery is almost nonexistent, and the organization doesn't really notice because it's always been this way.

Others have made a start. They've restructured, trained, announced new principles. But the picture of what good looks like stayed vague — something borrowed from a conference or a benchmark visit — and when pressure came, the organization defaulted to its old patterns. The model didn't fail because the intention was wrong. It failed because no one had really built a shared picture of what they were actually aiming for.

Both situations have the same solution. Not a model to copy, but a set of lenses through which the leadership team can look at their current reality and start to imagine something better. Something that's actually theirs. Together with their organisation.

Six Lenses for Building Your Own Picture

What follows isn't a framework. It's a set of perspectives I've found consistently useful when working with leadership teams on the question: what does good look like for us? Each one opens a conversation. Together, they tend to surface the same things — because most organizations that build product well have found their own answers to the same underlying questions.

1. Alignment How does the organization know what's important — and how does it stay focused when everything feels urgent? Alignment isn't about cascading goals from the top down. It's about setting clear direction, explaining the context behind it, and then trusting the organization to figure out how to work toward it. Teams that understand why a direction matters can make smart tradeoffs on their own. Teams that are just executing orders can't. The question to ask: do our people understand where we're going well enough to make good decisions without asking permission?

2. Organizational Design Before you can decide what teams to form, you need to understand the business. What value are you actually trying to create, and for whom? How do you need to be organized to let that value flow and to learn from it? Most organizations design their structure around functions or history rather than around value creation — and then wonder why everything moves slowly and feedback loops are broken. The question to ask: does our structure serve the business we're trying to build, or the business we used to be?

3. The Product Team The product team is where value is actually created. Not in the strategy deck, not in the governance layer — in the team. Getting this right means being deliberate about who belongs in the core team, what competencies are needed full-time versus available on demand, and how the team is connected to what it needs in order to move autonomously. Cross-functional by design, not by intent. The question to ask: are our teams set up to own a problem end-to-end, or are they set up to execute someone else's solution?

4. Value Creation Process How do you qualify an idea before building it? How much do you learn about a problem before committing to a solution? In many organizations the answer is: not much. An idea comes from a manager or a sales conversation, gets prioritized somewhere, and lands in the team's backlog. Discovery — the work of understanding whether something is worth building, and for whom — is either absent or treated as a phase rather than a continuous practice. The question to ask: are we learning our way toward good decisions, or are we building our way out of bad ones?

5. Cross-Functional Integration Product teams don't exist in isolation. They need to work with marketing, sales, customer service, legal, data, and whatever other parts of the organization are relevant to their context. The question is whether those connections are designed to help teams move or to slow them down. Good integration means the team can get what it needs without creating dependencies that create bottlenecks. The question to ask: what does a team have to go through to get something done, and how much of that is actually necessary?

6. Leadership This one tends to get left off the list, and it's the most important one. Transforming to a product operating model requires leaders to lead differently — not just structurally, but behaviorally. Leaders who are used to directing and deciding have to learn to sense, to ask questions, to stay curious about what's actually happening rather than managing to dashboards. They have to model the way they want the organization to work. Without this, the other five lenses don't matter much, because the leadership behavior around the model will quietly undermine it. The question to ask: are we leading in a way that's consistent with the organization we're trying to build?

Co-Creating the Picture

These lenses aren't meant to be handed to an organization as a checklist. They're meant to open conversations — first in the leadership team, and then across the organization. Because the picture of what good looks like can't come only from the top. Area leaders need to make it real in their part of the organization. Product teams need to understand the thinking well enough to adapt it when circumstances change.

This is what co-creation actually means in practice. Not a workshop where everyone writes on sticky notes and an outside team synthesizes it afterward. It's the leadership team building enough shared understanding of what they're aiming for that the organization can carry it forward without them in the room.

That picture will look different in every organization. But when it's built from the inside, with these kinds of questions as scaffolding, it tends to become something the organization can actually use — not a model borrowed from somewhere else, but a direction they've genuinely started to own.

This article is the fourth in a series of five articles about transformation. Most product transformations fail not because of wrong process or structure, but because leaders aren't present, honest with each other, or connected to what's actually happening. This series is about what actually works—and what doesn't.