Not Every Company Needs to Be Product Led
The relentless push towards product-led growth has created a bizarre theatre where companies twist themselves into shapes they were never meant to hold.
Here’s what nobody says out loud: product-led growth is a distribution model that works brilliantly for specific contexts and fails spectacularly outside them. But we’ve somehow decided it’s a universal truth, like gravity or compound interest. Because it sounds cool & trendy and promotes more power accumulation at the PM level.
I’ve seen it at enterprise software companies, start-ups and B2B tools. Someone at an exec offsite mentions Slack or Figma, and suddenly there’s a roadmap item about “bottoms-up adoption” wedged between actual customer needs. It’s cargo cult thinking dressed up as strategy.
Product-led works when you’ve got low friction, quick time-to-value, and individuals who can make buying decisions. Think Notion, Calendly, Loom. But when you’re selling data centre optimisation software to procurement committees, the self-serve signup form isn’t bold innovation. It’s just confusing.
The thing everyone believes
The narrative is seductive. Cut out the expensive sales team. Let the product do the talking. Users become champions become buyers. Growth compounds. It’s elegant, it’s efficient, it’s... completely wrong for most companies.
And look, I get it. Sales-led feels heavy. Expensive. Old world. There’s something deeply appealing about the idea that if you just build it well enough, they’ll come. It’s the field of dreams for SaaS companies.
But that appeal is doing serious damage. I’ve watched companies:
Build self-serve flows nobody asked for
Create free tiers that cannibalise their sales pipeline
Invest in viral loops for products people use once a quarter
Hire growth PMs when they needed account managers
Obsess over activation metrics whilst ignoring implementation success
“The best product strategy is the one that actually works for your business model, not the one that works for the company you wish you were.”
What’s actually happening (and what nobody admits)
Let’s be honest about what these debates really are. When executives argue about being product-led versus sales-led versus operations-driven, they’re not having a business conversation. They’re having a power struggle dressed up in business terminology.
Who gets the final say on roadmap priorities? Who controls the budget? Whose metrics define success? Call it product-led and suddenly the CPO has leverage. Call it sales-led and the CRO runs the show. Operations-driven? Well, the COO just won.
I’ve sat in enough exec meetings to recognise the pattern. Someone tables an “important initiative” about go-to-market motion, and what follows is twenty minutes of people defending their organisational territory whilst pretending to care about customer outcomes. It’s a theatre.
The company that spent eighteen months on their failed PLG transformation? The real story was their new CPO trying to claw back authority from a sales leader who’d run the place for a decade. The product-led initiative was just the weapon they chose.
And look, even from a product manager’s perspective, creating a product management dictatorship is completely irrational. You end up focusing on product metrics that have bugger all to do with whether the business actually works.
I’ve seen PMs celebrate hitting their activation targets whilst the company’s burning cash. They’ve built the perfect onboarding flow for users who never convert. They’ve nailed their engagement metrics whilst sales can’t close deals because the product doesn’t solve the actual buying committee’s problem.
You’re chasing DAUs when the business model requires annual contracts. You’re obsessing over viral coefficients when expansion revenue comes from dedicated account teams. You’re measuring feature adoption when customers actually care about implementation speed.
It’s not just bad for the business. It’s career suicide. Because when the board asks why revenue’s tanking, “but our retention cohorts look great” isn’t going to save you.
There’s a second-order effect playing out that’s more interesting than the strategy choice itself. Companies that force product-led motions into sales-led businesses create organisational confusion that takes years to untangle.
Your engineering team starts focusing on signup conversion. Your customer success team wonders why they’re suddenly doing pre-sales. Your sales team feels undermined. Your CFO sees ballooning CAC with declining ACV. And your product team is building features for a customer journey that doesn’t exist.
I watched this at a compliance software company. They added a free trial. Signups went up. Great. Except 90% of signups were individual contributors who had zero buying authority. The actual decision makers, the ones at VP level who’d previously get straight to a demo with sales, now had to wade through a self-serve flow designed for a completely different buyer.
The conversion rate tanked. But hey, MQLs were up.
My point
Here’s what I think: being sales-led is not a temporary state on the way to product-led enlightenment. For many companies, it’s the right end state.
If your product requires implementation, configuration, or integration, you need humans in the sales process. If your buyer isn’t your user, you need humans. If deals involve procurement, legal, security reviews, you definitely need humans. If your product solves a problem people don’t know they have yet, humans.
The companies doing this well aren’t apologising for their go-to-market. Salesforce isn’t embarrassed about their enterprise sales team. SAP isn’t rushing to add self-serve. Workday knows exactly what they are.
And here’s something else nobody wants to say: some products are just interfaces for a service. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And that’s completely fine.
Your scheduling software isn’t the product. The reliable infrastructure and support that makes meetings actually happen is the product. The app is just how customers interact with it. Same with most B2B software, honestly. The product is the implementation team, the ongoing improvements, the quarterly business reviews, the account management. The software is the front door.
But we’ve convinced ourselves that admitting this is somehow shameful. Like being a service business is less sophisticated than being a product business. So companies build elaborate self-serve features for products that fundamentally require human intervention to deliver value. It’s absurd.
Actually, that’s not quite what I mean. They’re not just accepting it. They’re leaning into it. They’re building product experience around what works for their actual motion, not what works for the PLG playbook.
The pattern I keep seeing
Companies with real product discipline make this call early. They look at unit economics, at their ICP, at buying committees and implementation timelines. Then they build a product experience that supports their actual go-to-market, not someone else’s.
When I was working with a fintech company selling to CFOs, we had this moment of clarity. We’d been trying to build viral sharing features. Why? Because that’s what product-led companies do. Except CFOs don’t share budget management tools. They don’t invite their mates. They buy through an RFP process that takes six months.
Once we stopped pretending, everything got easier. We built better reporting for demos. We created proof-of-concept environments sales could spin up. We invested in integration quality instead of signup conversion. Revenue grew faster.
Here’s another pattern worth noting: some organisations would be significantly more profitable if they just added a proper layer of CSMs between sales and the product. Not as an expensive add-on, but as the actual delivery model.
I know a company that sells workforce management software. They tried self-serve onboarding. Activation rates were terrible. Then they hired three CSMs to do personalised onboarding calls. Suddenly customers were live in two weeks instead of never. Expansion revenue tripled. The CSMs paid for themselves in the first quarter.
But that model doesn’t fit the product-led narrative. It’s human-intensive. It doesn’t scale logarithmically. It requires hiring people instead of tweaking funnels. So companies avoid it even when the unit economics scream that it’s the right move.
“Sometimes the most scalable solution is admitting you need humans in the loop and building your business model around that reality.”
The irony is that focusing on sales-led doesn’t mean ignoring product quality. If anything, it demands more from your product because the stakes per deal are higher. Lose a self-serve user, you’ve lost £20 MRR. Lose an enterprise deal, you’ve lost £200k ARR and poisoned a potential reference.
Part of me wonders if we’ll look back at this period as a temporary hype cycle, like agile or design thinking. Not that those concepts are wrong, just that the universal application was daft.
Or maybe the pendulum swings further. Maybe in five years, every company really can be product-led because buying behaviour shifts entirely. I doubt it though. Some categories just require human relationship and trust.
What this reveals
The obsession with product-led is really about control. As product people, we want to believe our craft is enough. Build it right and the market responds. It’s comforting. It’s also naive.
The companies that win are the ones comfortable with the reality that go-to-market matters as much as product. Sometimes more. They hire product people who understand that a killer demo flow matters more than a slick onboarding sequence. That customer expansion features beat new user activation features.
They build products for how they sell, not how they wish they could sell.
And honestly? There’s something refreshing about that clarity. Stop performing product-led. Build what actually moves your business forward. Your investors will thank you. Your team will thank you. Your customers probably won’t notice because they were never looking for self-serve anyway.
The question isn’t whether you should be product-led. It’s whether you’re honest enough to admit what actually works.