The Product-Led Paradox: From Rhetoric to Cargo Cults
Rediscovering Product Craft in the Age of AI – Part 2/5
In Part I, I traced how product craft has been fading, replaced by rituals that feel safe but don’t move the needle. The next chapter in that story is the rise of “product-led.” It has been a corporate slogan for many technology-centric companies for a while. They all claim it in some way. Job ads for product roles often mention it. Execs and boards nod gravely at the phrase. But ask what it really means, and you’ll find as many definitions as people you ask, and most of them miss the point.
I don’t say this to knock the profession. I’ve spent my career advocating for product-led as a defining trait of successful technology companies. But here’s the rub: it only works if the craft is shared across the organisation. Otherwise, it collapses into rhetoric. And now, in an AI-soaked moment, that absence is easier than ever to paper over with dashboards and demos.
So let’s talk about the paradox. Why startups and incumbents both fall into cargo-cult versions of “product-led,” why transformations often implode under their own ambition, and why the craft of building that lives beyond the product function is the only real defence.
TL;DR: “Product-led” has become the new corporate slogan claimed by almost every company, but it is rarely the reality. Too often, it devolves into cargo-cult rituals in startups and bloated transformations in incumbents. Real product craft isn’t the job of PMs alone. It shows up in how the whole organisation thinks, decides, and learns. And without that shared discipline, the product-led promise collapses into theatre.
If Agile gave us the rituals, ‘Product-Led’ gave us the rhetoric.
“Product-led isn’t dashboards, funnels, or shipping velocity. It’s how the whole organisation reasons about what to build, when, and why.”
The term took off in an era shaped by cloud, mobile, and the consumerisation of enterprise software. When the bar for user experience jumped, companies could no longer rely on sales contracts or system integrators to prop them up. The product itself had to pull its weight. ‘Product-led’ became shorthand for that shift and a label meant to signal seriousness about building products that win on their own merit. But the label quickly blurred. For some, it meant dashboards and funnels. For others, it meant giving PMs authority. And it doesn’t help that “product-led” often gets muddled with Product-Led Growth (PLG). The two are related but not interchangeable: PLG is a go-to-market strategy, while product-led is an essential operating model.
Product-led isn’t dashboards, funnels, or shipping velocity. It’s how the whole organization reasons about what to build, when, and why. In the rare organisations where this model runs deep, you see the difference. Sales teams understand the cost of every “yes.” Engineers don’t just code, they help define the solution. Designers push beyond surface polish to shape experiences that reinforce core product values. Finance looks at how bets unfold over years, not just quarters. Customers feel it too, and have the confidence to align with a product vision they trust and even want to co-innovate. And Boards develop the confidence to evaluate and invest in product strategy beyond a dashboard, NPS score, or ARR curve.
I know this type of model will sound very aspirational, but it isn’t. I have lived and worked inside organisations that operated this way, and the results were transformative. Once you’ve experienced it, you can’t go back. But let’s be clear, even when it’s real, being product-led is messy, full of debates, trade-offs and decisions in the face of ambiguity. And it’s a far cry from how many companies actually continue to operate today, where “product-led” is a slide in the investor deck or a phrase sprinkled into role descriptions.
That’s the paradox. The model only works when it lives across the organisation, yet most attempts reduce it to slogans, metrics, or authority games. Which brings us to the traps companies fall into when they try to copy the form without the substance.
The Cargo Cult Contagion
And this is where the gap between rhetoric and reality widens. When companies chase the appearance of being ‘Product-Led’ without the substance, they drift into cargo cults. The tragedy is not the ambition. Ambition matters. It’s that ambition gets smothered by theatre instead of being channelled into better judgment and sharper choices.
In startups and new scale-ups, it often begins with good intent. They don’t carry decades of technical debt, but they inherit the theatre of bigger firms in miniature. The urge to “professionalize” brings quarterly planning, layered rituals, and internal tooling, without the clarity of purpose that makes any of it useful. I’ve seen teams with real product instincts lose their edge the moment they decide it’s time to “do product properly.” They hire big names, roll out OKRs, and stack on frameworks, not because complexity demands it, but because they think that’s what “grown-up” companies do.
“Transformations that look bold on paper often collapse under their own weight.”
Meanwhile, many legacy organisations trying to modernise also fall into the same trap. Digital and cloud transformations are launched while serving global customer bases on layers of legacy tech, often accumulated through years of growth-at-all-cost myopia and acquisitions. The reflex is to import leaders and practices from elsewhere (preferably a high-profile tech company) and hope they bring playbooks that translate into outcomes. But copying the visible structures of Silicon Valley without the underlying mindset rarely works. In tech hubs, product-led practices grew out of necessity, to compete, to learn faster, to survive. Transplanted wholesale into companies or regions without that grounding, they become rituals without conviction.
The result is typically transformations that look bold on paper but collapse under their own weight. Companies try to change everything at once rather than making sharper choices about where to evolve, where to cut their losses, and where to simply get more efficient. Without that right thinking, the theatre looks impressive while conviction quietly drains away.
And whether weighed down by history or racing to grow up, the destination ends up eerily similar: product organisations that look OK-ish on a slide but lack conviction in outcomes. Teams go through the motions, frameworks get implemented, metrics get tracked. Meanwhile, the essential capabilities of noticing, deciding, shaping, and learning quietly atrophy.
And that’s the real tragedy. Craft doesn’t live in a process or a role. It lives in how people show up every day, how they learn, how they measure failure, and how they do all this together across roles and functions, which is why the timing matters so much right now. Even as companies carry on with the theatre, AI has arrived, promising shortcuts, cost savings, productivity gains, and silver bullets. In the absence of craft, AI risks becoming yet another layer of optics with fancier dashboards, faster demos, inflated claims of productivity, while roles are declared obsolete, headcount shrinks, and the promised innovation or ROI never materialises.
The irony is that many of these companies already have the raw material, talent, ambition, and customers who want them to succeed. What’s missing is the discipline and courage to cut through the theatre and make bold choices with conviction.
Craft Lives Beyond the Product Function
One of the most unhelpful framings we’ve created as an industry is treating product craft as something that only product managers can or must do, something to train into individuals, rather than something that must compound across the whole organisation.
Real product craft shows up everywhere, and true product leadership makes sure it does. A sales insight that sparks a strategy rethink. An engineer challenging a margin assumption early. A designer spotting a usage pattern others missed. A CEO or Board tying company strategy to a category vision, and probing product bets with the same rigour as financial risk. Craft isn’t confined to a team or a role. It’s in how an organisation makes sense of decisions, and whether it has the judgment to shape them.
“Cultivating product craft is not about distributing it through committees or consensus. It’s about ensuring convergence on shared outcomes...”
This is where culture meets craft. Many companies still cling to an industrial IT model that splits “the business” from “product and technology.” You can hear it in the language: the business needs X, tech will deliver Y. That mindset is corrosive and the opposite of a product-led operating model. It keeps product and technology thinking walled off as a specialist function rather than the shared discipline of how a company creates value.
The drift from principles to rituals has also played out in the Product profession itself. In the push to professionalise, the role has been industrialised with certifications, conferences, and a thriving industry of content. Much of this is valuable, and I benefit from it myself every day. But we are shouting in our own echo chamber, and the side effect is real. A role that doesn’t write shippable code, design exceptional experiences, or close deals has been elevated into a near-mystical specialty, rather than recognized as something every function an individual can practise in the pursuit of company building. The result is that “product-led” becomes rhetoric, often shaped more by power than conviction.
Misplaced structures amplify the issue. Conway’s Law reminds us that products mirror the communication patterns of the teams who build them. Every extra layer, restructure, or silo fragments the chance of a shared sense of purpose. Momentum drains in endless meetings. Teams lose sight of how decisions connect. Cultivating product craft is not about distributing it through committees or consensus. It’s about ensuring convergence on shared outcomes, rather than dilution by the very structures meant to support it.
In truly product-led companies, product leaders act as coaches, facilitators, and connectors. Their craft is ensuring that product thinking becomes everyone’s work, which is why the question of craft matters so much right now. Just as organisations need it most, AI is tempting us to skip the discipline altogether, offering the appearance of progress while quietly eroding the judgment that makes it possible.
High-functioning organisations are not built on job titles or transformation slides, but on a culture of shared judgment and craft. Many companies don’t have that muscle today. And just as the theatre has taken hold, AI has entered the stage. What happens when the spotlight hits and there’s no substance behind the script?
Next: In Part 3, we’ll look at what happens when AI holds up the mirror and exposes the absence of product thinking, accelerates dysfunction where it’s already weak, and challenges even the strongest organizations to sharpen their judgment.