Product leadership

Your organisation has a senior leader with clear accountability and authority for product outcomes.
Typically a Chief Product Officer, Product Director, Head of Product, or in some cases a Founder, CEO, or CTO.

Leadership understanding & buy-in

Executive leadership understand the concepts of the Product Operating Model and actively champion its implementation.

Empowerment

Teams are empowered to solve customer and organisational problems, not just deliver features.

Funding model

Product teams are funded through stable, ongoing operational budgets (OpEx) rather than short-term, project-based funding (CapEx).

Adequate funding

Teams have sufficient, predictable funding for continuous product discovery and improvement.

Product strategy

Your organisation maintains clear, documented product strategies that are regularly refreshed and well understood by teams.

Strategic alignment

Product strategy is explicitly aligned to organisational objectives and actively guides team-level product decisions and prioritisation.

Reporting lines & decision authority

Reporting lines across product, design, and engineering are clearly defined and understood, with balanced leadership representation.

Domain boundaries & ownership

Team boundaries and responsibilities are intentionally designed to minimise handoffs and maximise flow.

Cross-boundary collaboration

Teams collaborate effectively across domains through well-defined interaction modes, managed dependencies, and shared ownership of outcomes.

Competence & effectiveness

Teams are able to discover and deliver products efficiently, achieving objectives and demonstrating measurable impact.

Roles & responsibilities

Teams are built around the core disciplines of product, design, and engineering.

Development & autonomy

Teams are supported through individual development plans, allocated training time, coaching, and mentoring.

Capacity

There is sufficient capacity across disciplines to optimise flow and achieve organisational objectives, sustainably.

Internal collaboration

Collaboration within teams is strong, with shared ownership of outcomes and risks across disciplines.

Cross-organisational collaboration

Product teams collaborate closely with the wider organisation, such as sales, marketing, operations, and compliance.

Capturing opportunities

Opportunities are consistently captured through well-defined, multi-channel processes that include customer feedback, data insights, market trends, and internal inputs.

Prioritisation

Opportunities are evaluated and prioritised using clear, transparent criteria that balance user needs, organisation impact, and technical feasibility.

User access

Teams have direct, unencumbered access to users and product data.

Discovery quality

Discovery is a cross-functional activity, combining quantitative and qualitative insights, to de-risk opportunities.

Continuous, lightweight discovery

Discovery is continuous and lightweight, running alongside delivery rather than as a one-off or upfront phase.

Release frequency

Teams release small, independent changes frequently and reliably. (As a minimum, every 2 weeks).

Testing

Teams own quality end-to-end through automated testing, runtime observability and fast feedback loops integrated throughout delivery.

Teams actively manage flow by limiting work in progress, focusing on completing and learning from small, valuable increments in both the definition phase and engineering phases.

Developer experience

Developer experience is treated as a core capability. Teams can autonomously build, test, and deploy through product-led platforms.

Tech Debt

Technical debt is treated as a strategic lever, with its impact on future capability visible, quantified, and deliberately managed to sustain delivery flow and product adaptability.

Autonomy

Engineering teams have clear ownership of technical decisions within defined principles, balancing autonomy and speed whilst maintaining core standards across the organisation.

Metrics

Teams track and act on developer productivity and delivery metrics, such as DORA and SPACE, to improve flow, quality, and team experience.

Minimal handoffs

Teams minimise handoffs by owning outcomes end-to-end and collaborating through clearly defined interfaces, shared artefacts, and transparent backlogs that make dependencies visible and manageable.

Safe, phased rollout

Teams release features safely and incrementally, using phased rollouts, feature flags, and clear rollback plans to validate changes, manage risk and build confidence before full release.

Post-release learning

Released features are actively monitored with defined success metrics, instrumentation, and observability, with feedback loops and supporting teams (e.g. support, sales, marketing) enabled to respond to impact and user feedback.

Clarity of value

The organisation has a clear, shared definition of organisation and user value, understood consistently across product, design, engineering, and leadership.

Measuring impact

Product teams track outcomes that reflect real user and business impact, not just delivery outputs or activity metrics.

Moving the needle

Teams regularly review and act on impact data, showing measurable progress toward strategic goals and adjusting priorities based on what’s working.

Return on investment

The organisation actively measures and reviews the return on investment of its product initiatives, balancing short-term performance with long-term strategic value.

Product Operating Model
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