Hello!
Well, May was a full one! I kicked off a new six-part article series on AI, squeezed in four speaking and workshop events, and still managed to surface a couple of reads worth your time.
Grab a coffee, there is plenty in this one. ☕️
🏴☠️ Most Product Transformations Don’t Stick
Over the past few years I have spent a significant amount of time working with organisations that want to build products in a better way.
No surprise really, people do still care about continuous improvement!
Some are still early in that journey though, and some have been talking about it for years without making meaningful progress.
The pattern I keep returning to, regardless of size or sector, is a persistent gap between wanting to operate as a “real product organisation” and actually doing the operational work required to get there.
Back to Basics
When I think about why organisations want this shift in the first place, it helps to get back to basics.
The underlying goal is to continuously deliver customer value in a way that produces business impact. Most teams should be driving towards one of five things: revenue, cost saving, adoption, re-engagement of existing customers, or shareholder value.
A product operating model is simply a means to those ends, not an end in itself. Keeping that in view matters, because the discussion becomes abstract quite quickly.
The most common mistake I see is organisations treating the declaration of intent as the work itself. A senior leader joins, announces that the organisation is now product-led, and the assumption is that the identity has changed.
The people on the ground feel a genuine moment of excitement, and then they wait for something to change, and nothing does, because the work of actually supporting teams to operate differently has not started.
I once worked with a large financial services organisation where exactly this happened.
Framing changed overnight, the ways of working did not.
Within months the energy had dissipated and teams were building in exactly the same way they always had.
Having a clear vision and putting a flag in the ground is an important starting point. The problem is treating it as sufficient. What tends to follow is either nothing, or a set of principles that sit in a document nobody reads, or a round of training that touches the surface without addressing the underlying capability gaps.
The Busy Work Trap
There is a second failure mode that Product Ops as a discipline needs to be wary of, which is the risk of over-processing.
I have seen teams where the energy that should go into discovery, into understanding customers, into being experimental, gets redirected into process design.
Annual planning frameworks, quarterly rituals, templates for everything.
It feels productive because there is activity and output, but it does not change how the organisation actually builds products in a positive way. It’s the same with the endless “ways of working” sessions being had across teams.
What does work is treating organisational change as a continuous improvement problem rather than a one-time intervention.
That requires dedicated effort, someone paying attention to whether capabilities are developing over time, and a willingness to move resources as priorities shift.
That is not how most transformation efforts are funded or scoped, many lack the leadership sponsorship required to support the change.
Context is Everything
The other thing I keep coming back to is contextuality.
The question that actually matters is not how a well-known technology company runs their product teams, but how this organisation, with its particular history and constraints, can build products better than it does today.
Importing a model wholesale from a context that does not match yours tends to create friction and, eventually, rejection.
Sustaining Commitment
Organisations are not struggling because they lack good principles to aspire to.
They are struggling because the operational work of building towards those principles is genuinely hard, and it requires a sustained commitment that is easy to under-resource or abandon when other priorities arrive.
Article by Chris Compston
🎤 Events
🇭🇷 Product World // Opatija, Croatia The headline event of the month for me! I delivered the second day keynote in Opatija and it really was an amazing couple of days. The setting is genuinely hard to beat, right on the Adriatic, just beautiful.
👨🏻💻 Product Academy // Remote Workshop Facilitated a half-day workshop with the Product Academy. A focused session and a sharp group, the remote format worked well for the depth of conversation we managed to get to.
👨🏻💻 BAUX // Remote Masterclass Joined the BAUX community for a remote Masterclass, a great format for getting into the detail and a really engaged group of practitioners on the call. Thanks for taking part!
🇬🇧 Product Circle: Leaders // London Great to be back in the room with the London Product Circle crew. Always a grounded conversation with leaders who are dealing with the same challenges in real time.
🇷🇴 PROW // Romania Already looking ahead to October where I have signed up for PROW. More details to follow as it gets closer.
📚 From the Reading List
Joca Torres is making a straightforward case here in his article, that we should all find hard to argue with and yet doesn’t always happen within organisations.
The team that builds something should own what breaks in it. It’s the only arrangement that creates a genuine incentive to get quality right in the first place.
Next is a short one, but with a solid point that is worth sharing.
Most organisations treat change communication as something that flows downward. Leadership sets the message, managers pass it on and somewhere along the way the nuance gets lost.
The argument here is that the model needs to be circular rather than linear, with genuine feedback loops at each level rather than a relay race. What I find most useful is the practical framing around middle managers, who tend to carry the most communication burden whilst also being furthest from both the original intent and the front-line reality.
The prompt to turn meetings into conversations rather than briefings, by asking questions rather than fielding them, is the kind of small behavioural shift that's easier to act on than broader principles about "two-way communication."
Worth a read if you're currently in the middle of a change programme and wondering why the message isn't landing quite as you expected.
👩🏽🚀 Product Careers
New roles at Deliveroo, Adobe, SoSafe and more …
Head of Platform Product Operations / AI Transformation Consultant / Senior Product Operations Manager / Product Operations (Senior) Manager / Product Operations Specialist / Product Operations Manager / Director of Digital Products / Director, PLG Strategy / Senior Product Manager / Director of Product Management / Product Operations Manager
🤩 And finally …
Thank you to just some of the great conversations I’ve been having;
Shannon Vettes - CPO/CEO of Usersnap / John Griffin - Product Design Manager @ MBP / Graham Leto - Senior Product Ops Manager @ Staples / Christine Itwaru - Fractional Product Leader / Hugo Froes - Director, Product Strategy and Advisory @ Nagarro / Helen Bird - Lead Product Ops Manager @ MBP / John Skitt - Founder @ Third Product / Fred Calvez - Senior Product & Engineer Ops Director @ Smartly / Ignacio Canales - Principal Product Ops Manager @ Super / Katie Hudson - Product Ops Lead @ Yazio.
Fancy a chat? Book some time with me at chriscompston.com/letschat
🤦♂️ Did you know …
