In my 20+ years career in product leadership, I’ve witnessed a fundamental transformation in how we approach product leadership. Let me share some observations that might resonate with fellow product leaders.
The role of product leadership has evolved from being the “feature factory manager” to becoming the “value creation orchestrator.” This shift isn’t just semantic – it represents a profound change in how we think about and measure product success.
Let’s look at this evolution through different lenses:
From Output to Outcomes
Traditional product management was obsessed with outputs: features shipped, story points completed, releases made. Modern product leadership focuses on outcomes: customer value delivered, business metrics moved, strategic objectives achieved. At Truvo, this shift helped us grow digital revenues from €50M to €150M ARR in two years. The driver? MySite, a modular WYSIWYG website builder – think of it as the precursor of today’s WIX – that created immediate value for SMEs. In fact, we acquired 20,000 SME customers in just 12 months. Linking every product decision to measurable customer value made all the difference.
But how do we actually measure what truly matters?
Measuring What Really Matters
Drawing from John Doerr’s “Measure What Matters,” we’ve learned that OKRs in product need to directly link to value creation. But here’s what they don’t tell you: implementing value-based OKRs requires a cultural transformation. At dunnhumby, we moved from measuring feature adoption to measuring business impact. For example, instead of tracking how many retailers used our forecasting tool, we measured the reduction in waste and out-of-stocks it delivered – a shift that increased product stickiness and doubled user adoption. The key was connecting product metrics to financial outcomes: revenue uplift, cost reduction, or margin improvement. But perhaps more importantly, we learned that not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured matters. For instance, while we could measure every click in our retail media platform, what really mattered was advertiser ROI – a metric that required close collaboration with customers to define and track properly.
This evolution in measurement needs to flow through the entire organization. Product teams should understand how their daily decisions impact business metrics, engineers should see how their technical choices affect customer value, and stakeholders should evaluate success through outcome-based metrics rather than output-based ones. It’s not just about changing metrics – it requires a fundamental shift in how teams think about success.
What capabilities does this transformation require from product leaders?
The Modern Product Leader’s Toolkit
Today’s product leader needs three core capabilities:
- Data Fluency: This comes in two flavors. First, the ability to read and interpret product metrics to drive successful outcomes – from basic engagement to complex value creation indicators. Second, and equally important, the ability to identify opportunities to monetize data, transforming it from a byproduct into a value generator. At dunnhumby, we did both: using data to optimize customer experience while building data products that monetized insights from 800 million shoppers worldwide. Our product was the data!
- Business Acumen: Understanding unit economics, growth levers, and market dynamics. In platform businesses, this means grasping network effects and how to trigger them. At Yahoo!, we learned that business acumen meant balancing the platform equation: how to create enough value for both sides of the marketplace while maintaining sustainable unit economics. Product decisions are business decisions, and in platforms, they’re ecosystem decisions.
- Customer Empathy: Not just through research, but through deep understanding of customer jobs-to-be-done and value creation opportunities. At Reward, we built the UK’s largest retail coalition for RBS’s loyalty program, reaching millions of banking customers. Success required deep understanding of three different customers: the bank wanting to drive card usage, retailers seeking incremental sales, and end consumers looking for meaningful rewards. The program distributed over £1bn in cashback because we understood and delivered value to each party in the ecosystem.
How does AI reshape this value creation equation?
The AI Impact
AI isn’t just another technology wave. It’s fundamentally reshaping how we think about value creation in products.
The challenge has inverted: from struggling to build what customers want, to choosing which of the infinite possibilities will drive the most value. During my time at dunnhumby, we faced this daily: every process could be automated, every decision augmented, every experience personalized.
But successful AI initiatives weren’t determined by technical sophistication. Instead, they were defined by three critical factors:
- Demonstrable value creation (how much additional revenue or cost reduction?)
- Seamless workflow integration (does it make users’ lives easier or more complex?)
- Clear business outcomes (can we measure the impact?)
This shift emphasizes a crucial evolution in product leadership: the ability to navigate through endless technical possibilities to identify true value creators. It’s no longer about building AI capabilities – it’s about orchestrating them into coherent value streams that transform customer businesses.
The most successful product leaders today aren’t those who understand AI best, but those who excel at identifying where AI intersects with maximum customer value and operational reality.
What’s really holding organizations back from embracing this evolution?
Cultural Transformation
Perhaps the biggest challenge isn’t technical – it’s cultural. Success requires:
- Cross-functional alignment around value creation
- Evidence-based decision making at all levels
- Customer-centric prioritization frameworks
- Continuous learning and adaptation
The most successful product organizations I’ve led share one common trait: they’ve moved beyond the feature factory mindset to embrace value creation as their north star.
Looking ahead, I believe the next frontier in product leadership will be about orchestrating value creation across increasingly complex ecosystems of products, services, and experiences. The winners will be those who can navigate this complexity while keeping laser-focused on customer value creation.
What’s your experience with this evolution? How is your organization adapting to this new paradigm? Let’s continue this conversation in the comments.
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