Invest in a Product Organization when your Value Creators Can’t Deliver Value to Customers.

You don’t need to invest in building a product team when the value builders — Editors, Engineers, Designers, Chefs, Data Scientists, etc. — in your company can directly serve tangible value to your customers.

• In print newspapers, the editorial team, along with supporting teams, themselves can decide the content strategy, report, write, design, and place the stories on the newspaper.
• Similarly, if you are running a media operation on a social platform — Substack, YouTube — then it is unlikely that you’ll need Product Manager. Editors themselves can manage it with the support of an IT guy who can set things up for them.

In more sophisticated (and scaled up) products and businesses, the value creators — Editors, Engineers, Designers, Chefs, Data Scientists, etc. — struggle to navigate the complexity involved in delivering value to the customers directly. In such, you require a product team. Building, scaling, and refining Internet Products, Artificial Intelligence, etc. while is table stakes, is also extremely complex.

Additionally, as the system grows, it becomes more complex. and complexity slows down execution.