The latest Roadmap to Mastery article on The Product Way examines this dynamic in depth. It traces how metrics acquire constituencies: the person who requested the number, the team that reports on it, the executive who references it in board presentations, the sales leader whose commission structure touches it. Each has a relationship with the metric that goes beyond its informational value, and proposing retirement starts a conversation about identity and visibility that most cleanup efforts underestimate.

The article also examines context collapse: what happens when a number is read without the conditions that give it meaning. An NPS score that tanks because the survey hit during billing friction tells a different story than the aggregate suggests. Engagement numbers that look like intent on a search platform may signal confusion or aspiration. The precision of the number creates confidence, and the missing context creates incompleteness. Teams making decisions from those numbers are often more sure than they should be.

The March TPG Live roundtable surfaced both patterns, and this article goes deeper into the forces that keep them in place: why “just in case” wins every metric retirement debate, why the people who feel dashboard weight most have the least organizational leverage to change it, and how the conversation about retiring a metric is always a conversation about something else. Leaders who see these dynamics clearly can work within them, and the article traces how incremental approaches build the credibility and evidence that make each subsequent cleanup conversation easier.

Watch the full March TPG Live roundtable replay: https://youtube.com/live/8BCNuOYk-y0

For non-members: Join The Product Way to access the full article, the complete Roadmap to Mastery series, PM Select (curated introductions to trusted hiring managers), and weekly strategies: https://patreon.com/TheProductWay/membership

For existing members: Read the full article on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/patreon-why-your-154517188

#ProductManagement #ProductLeadership

Garrett Lang, Founder and President of PlateRate, chose real restaurants. Over the past several months, he has run beta events where actual diners use PlateRate in actual dining environments. PlateRate is the only pickup/delivery app that credits diners for trying a restaurant’s highest-rated menu items. It won the TPMAS (The Product Management Awards) award for Visionary Product of the Year 2019, and Garrett has been building and iterating on it for over a decade.

The beta events confirmed that PlateRate solves the core problem Garrett set out to address. People could order food, manage their own checks, and handle tipping through the app. The product worked. And the feature that generated the strongest response from beta diners was the freedom of walking out.

Finish the meal, tip on the app, leave. No flagging down a server. No waiting for a credit card return. The restaurant gets notified that the diner has paid, so when someone walks out, it is expected.

Garrett describes it as freedom, and that word carries weight for anyone who has ever watched ten minutes tick by after a meal waiting for the check to arrive. Product validation through beta testing in a real environment gave Garrett signal that surveys, focus groups, and prototype demos would not have surfaced with the same clarity.

That signal tells Garrett where PlateRate’s pull actually lives. If walking out is the moment that creates the strongest positive reaction, that insight shapes how the onboarding communicates value, how the marketing positions the product, and how the development team prioritizes features.

Garrett is transparent about where PlateRate sits today. The beta is live, and the product works, but he has specific quality thresholds that need to be met before public marketing begins: user friendly, intuitive, bug free, and performant. The redesigned website is still in progress. He is building toward a product that is pixel perfect before he starts spending on acquisition.

That approach takes discipline. Validation confirms you are solving the right problem, and the temptation to market early is strong at that point. Garrett’s path is to let the beta testing continue shaping the product until the experience matches the quality bar he has set. When PlateRate goes to market publicly, the product will already have earned loyalty from the people who tested it.

Subscribe to The Product Way on YouTube for more conversations with product leaders about validation, product strategy, and building products that earn loyalty.

Watch the Episode Now:

#ProductManagement #ProductLeadership #CareerGrowth #ProductExcellence

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Where Cross-Functional Ideas Come From

People rarely contribute outside their lane randomly. When a tester sketches a better user flow or a PM flags a metadata structuring issue, it means their proximity to the work has surfaced something the team’s default structure would miss. These contributions reflect experience accumulated across different disciplines, and they carry information the specialist in that domain may not have access to.

This is especially true for leaders who came to product management through non-traditional paths. Someone who has worked across research, operations, and technology sees the product through multiple lenses simultaneously. The connections they draw come from years of navigating different disciplines, and they surface patterns that a more linear career path would never produce. When teams create space for that range of observation, the product benefits from perspectives the org chart was never designed to capture.

What Changes When Teams Evaluate Ideas on Merit

The teams that genuinely break down role barriers in product teams change what happens to an idea after it’s raised. They evaluate the substance of the observation separately from the credentials of the person who offered it. When that separation becomes a real practice, something specific shifts: people start contributing their full range of thinking, because they’ve seen the team respond to the quality of the idea rather than the title behind it.

That shift compounds over time. A PM who regularly brings technical recommendations to the engineering table, and whose engineers take those recommendations seriously, builds a different kind of working relationship than one where contribution lanes are enforced. The products reflect it. The team culture reflects it. And the people on those teams carry a different level of investment in the outcome, because they know their observations will be heard.

How One Product Leader Practices This

Renata McCurley, Founder of Mariposa Insights and a product leader with over 20 years across consulting and enterprise delivery, has a specific approach to breaking down role barriers that starts with her own willingness to cross contribution lines. In this How I PM tip, she shares how she brings technical recommendations to her engineers and what that dynamic looks like when a team commits to evaluating ideas on merit.

“Don’t discount an idea just because of the source.” Renata McCurley, Founder, Mariposa Insights

Harpal Singh has answered that question more than a dozen times. Across 13+ interim CPO engagements at companies including Ada Health, Automata Robotics, and Selligent, he has led product organizations of 10 to 12 product managers where both sides understand the engagement has an end date. That constraint eliminates some of the most common tools managers use to build credibility: accumulated history, positional authority, and the slow demonstration of competence through long-term results.

What people-first leadership looks like under constraints

Harpal describes a specific trade-off that defines his approach: he would rather compromise the quality of the product than fail to give his people what they need to succeed. That statement sounds like the kind of thing leaders say without testing. In interim roles, it gets tested constantly.

When you enter a new team with limited time, every allocation decision reveals priorities. Time spent understanding what each person needs to grow is time that could have gone toward delivery. Choosing the person over the output has a visible cost. And that visibility is precisely what makes it work, because the team sees the choice being made in real time.

Why interim roles accelerate leadership development

Interim leadership compresses the feedback loop on management decisions. In a permanent role, the effects of management style play out over quarters or years. In an interim engagement lasting 9 to 10 months, the effects surface almost immediately. A team either responds to the leader’s approach or it does not, and there is limited time to course correct.

Harpal describes orienting every action around making the existing team successful. The reasoning is direct: because the engagement is temporary, the interim leader can only succeed if the team succeeds. That interdependence is always present in management, but interim roles make it impossible to ignore.

How teams evaluate authenticity

One of the most practical observations from this conversation is that teams can detect whether a leader’s stated investment in their growth matches their actual behavior. The gap between what a leader says and what a leader does is visible to the people being led, even when the leader believes it is hidden.

This applies well beyond interim roles. Any product leader managing a team is being evaluated on the consistency between their stated values and their daily decisions. The interim context makes the principle more visible, but the principle itself operates everywhere.

Harpal also shared how his approach to mentorship and hiring evolved across two decades of product leadership, and the specific moments that shaped his understanding of what people need from the person managing them.

Watch the full clip on YouTube and subscribe to The Product Way for more Product Excellence conversations.

Watch the Episode Now:

#ProductManagement #ProductLeadership #CareerGrowth #ProductExcellence

About the Podcast:

What became clear across the session is that the practices worth keeping share a characteristic: they survive honest evaluation. The ones that persist without evaluation are often protected by a specific dynamic. The person who would raise the question has less authority than the person who owns the practice. Once that pattern is visible, it changes how you look at everything on the calendar, the roadmap, and the team’s operating rhythm.

From the recap:

Product teams entering a new year face a specific kind of decision that rarely gets made explicitly. The practices that structured last year’s work are still running. Standups still happen at the same time. Backlogs still get groomed on the same cadence. Metrics still get reported in the same format. Most of these routines continue because stopping them would require a conversation nobody has scheduled.

The recap connects four themes into a system: retiring rituals, recognizing anti-patterns, adapting to AI-native product work, and building the environment that determines whether any of those changes hold. The Roadmap to Mastery series arriving over the coming weeks examines the organizational forces, political dynamics, and emotional costs that keep these patterns in place, and what experienced leaders do to change them.

• Read the full recap on Patreon → (for members)
• Join The Product Way to access the recap and the Roadmap to Mastery series → (for non-members)

The belief might have been about user behavior. It might have been about partner incentives. It might have been about which problem the market actually needed solved. Whatever it was, it felt true at the time. It was reasonable. It was shared. And it was wrong.

The cost is never just the work itself. It is the dependencies that formed around it. The commitments made to partners and customers. The organizational momentum that makes reversing feel more expensive than continuing. Teams end up defending a direction they no longer believe in because the cost of admitting the foundation was untested feels worse than the cost of building on it.

This is what it looks like when assumptions shape outcomes instead of evidence.

Why This Keeps Happening

Most product teams are rigorous about execution. They plan carefully. They measure outcomes. They run retros and adjust. The gap is upstream. The beliefs that justify the work in the first place rarely receive the same scrutiny as the work itself.

A roadmap item gets approved because it aligns with the strategy. The strategy rests on an assumption about user behavior. That assumption was formed months ago based on a handful of data points, a few customer conversations, and a lot of pattern matching. Nobody questions it because it feels like shared understanding. Everyone agrees. The belief sounds reasonable, and reasonable beliefs do not trigger scrutiny. But agreement is not evidence, and the assumption has never been tested.

This plays out in specific, recognizable ways. An integration gets prioritized because the team believes the partner’s users will adopt the product. The belief is reasonable, but the partner’s incentive structure actually discourages the adoption path the team designed for. A retention initiative ships because the team believes users drop off due to lack of features. The real issue is that users never understood the core workflow well enough to reach the features that exist. An onboarding improvement launches because the team believes the first session needs to be faster. The actual problem is that speed creates surface-level completion without building the understanding users need to return.

In each case, the work is well-executed. The assumption underneath it was never examined.

What Changes When Beliefs Become Visible

The strongest product organizations we see treat assumptions the way they treat any other strategic input. They name them. They write them down. They pressure test them before the organization builds around them. They sequence work so the most fragile beliefs are challenged first, while the cost of being wrong is still low.

These teams still move quickly. They invest their speed in the right order. They resolve the uncertainty that could invalidate a direction before they deepen commitment to it. The result is fewer late reversals, less wasted investment, and strategy that holds under pressure because it was built on beliefs that survived scrutiny.

The difference is visible in how these organizations handle roadmap reviews, partnership decisions, and scaling choices. The question they consistently ask is: what must be true for this to work, and have we tested it? That question, applied consistently, changes what gets funded, what gets sequenced first, and what gets held back until the foundation is stronger.

What We Built

Our latest deep dive translates this discipline into structured operating systems. The article provides methods for making the beliefs inside your roadmap visible and testable, for ordering work so the most consequential uncertainty is resolved before commitment deepens, and for connecting that evidence to real decisions about what to fund, what to sequence, and what to hold back.

It includes full implementation sequences, practical artifacts you can copy directly into your workflow, scoring rubrics, failure pattern guides with specific prevention methods, and role-specific advice structured from early PM through executive.

If your team has ever discovered too late that a major initiative was built on an untested belief, or if you are about to commit resources to a direction and need to know whether the foundation will hold, this is the system to answer that question before the cost of being wrong becomes the cost of continuing.

[Read the full article on Patreon.]

The instinct is to look downstream. What happened in week two? Did engagement features underperform? Was the value proposition unclear after the trial? Teams run retention analyses, build re-engagement campaigns, and add lifecycle emails. Sometimes these help. More often they treat symptoms while the root cause sits undisturbed at the very beginning of the experience.

What went wrong almost always happened in the first five minutes.

What Dashboards Cannot Show You

Most product teams measure early experience through completion. Did the user finish onboarding? Did they reach the activation milestone? Did they perform the target action? These metrics create a picture that looks clear and reassuring. The problem is that completion tells you what happened without telling you what the user understood.

A user who completes a guided tour knows what buttons they pressed. They do not necessarily know why those choices mattered or what to do next without being told. They were moved through the experience. They did not build the capability to move through it on their own.

This distinction matters because capability is what carries users forward after the first session ends. When the prompts are gone and the guides are finished, the user is alone with whatever understanding they built. If that understanding is shallow, the next session feels harder than the first. The third session feels harder still. Eventually the user stops returning and the dashboard registers a churn event that looks like it happened in week three but was actually decided in minute four.

The Momentum Problem Nobody Talks About

The same pattern plays out at the organizational level. A product shows strong early traction. Leadership treats that traction as a signal that the experience is working and makes scale decisions accordingly. Rollout expands. Support investment decreases. Marketing spend increases.

Then the traction plateaus and sustaining engagement starts getting more expensive. Customer success spends more time on early-stage users. Support tickets shift from technical issues to confusion about basic workflows. The team starts building nudges, reminders, and re-engagement flows to maintain the numbers they assumed the product would carry on its own.

What happened is that the momentum was real, but it was being subsidized. Follow-up emails from customer success were filling gaps the product left open. Defaults and prompts were making decisions users should have been making themselves. The organization was carrying engagement that the product had not earned. That works at small scale. It breaks at the exact moment growth is supposed to accelerate.

What Strong Teams Do Differently

The best product organizations we see do not treat early experience as a setup phase that precedes the real product. They treat it as infrastructure. They ask questions most teams skip: Where is the first moment the product expects the user to exercise real judgment without help? What does capable behavior actually look like at that moment? What happens when you strip away the guides and let the product carry meaning on its own?

These questions surface things that dashboards hide. They reveal where users are pausing and what they are misinterpreting. They expose where scale decisions are being made on signals that depend on organizational effort rather than product clarity. They show the difference between users who completed onboarding and users who are actually ready to continue.

When you treat early experience this way, onboarding and retention stop looking like separate challenges. They become two points along the same path. Retention is the downstream expression of whether early experience built genuine capability or just guided users through steps.

What We Built

Our latest deep dive takes these patterns and turns them into structured operating systems. The article provides methods for identifying where understanding must form, testing whether it actually has, evaluating whether your momentum will survive at scale, and connecting all of it to real decisions about what to ship, what to hold back, and where to invest.

It includes full implementation sequences, practical artifacts you can copy directly into your workflow, scoring rubrics, failure pattern guides with specific prevention methods, and role-specific advice structured from early PM through executive.

If your team has watched strong activation fail to become retention, or if you are about to scale something and need to know whether the experience is truly ready, this is the system to answer that question with evidence.

[Read the full article on Patreon.]

In this episode of How I PM, Michael Ionita — CEO of LFG Solutions, VP of Product, and General Manager of R&D — draws a clear line between the roadmap and the backlog and explains why most teams blur them.

Michael’s argument is straightforward: roadmaps should contain goals, outcomes, and the metrics you are trying to move. Features are how you get there. They belong in the backlog, connected to those goals, but not on the roadmap itself.

This reframing changes the conversation with stakeholders. Instead of debating which feature ships next, you are agreeing on what success looks like. That agreement drives focus, reduces noise, and keeps teams solving problems instead of just shipping tickets.

“You can keep your team focused on solving problems and not just implementing features.” – Michael Ionita

Connect with Michael: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelionita/

This is one of a small number of How I PM episodes available publicly.

The full collection of 50 real-world strategies from practicing product leaders is available exclusively to members of The Product Way. Members at the Practitioner tier and above also get access to PM Select — our service that makes curated personal introductions between product people and hiring managers — plus many more benefits.

https://patreon.com/TheProductWay/membership

AI agents don’t need logins. They don’t buy licenses. When an AI can manage pipeline, qualify leads, draft follow-ups, and forecast deals, the number of humans touching the software stops being a useful proxy for the value the software delivers. And yet, most of enterprise SaaS is still priced as if every dollar of value requires a human sitting in a chair.

This isn’t a prediction. It’s already happening. Intercom moved from per-seat to per-resolution. Sierra launched with outcome-based pricing from day one. Riskified has been pricing per successful transaction for years. The pattern is clear: define the outcome your product delivers, instrument it, and price against it.

I just published what I consider the most complete argument I’ve made on this topic — a long-form breakdown of outcome-based pricing as the structural replacement for per-seat SaaS and time-and-materials billing across software, consulting, and digital services.

What the Article Covers

The Salesforce case study. I walk through exactly how Salesforce, the poster child of per-seat pricing, would work on an outcome-based model. Qualified pipeline generated. Deals closed through the platform. Forecast accuracy delivered. The math shows why this isn’t just viable, but better for both sides.

Three modes of outcome-based pricing. Not every deal is the same. Sometimes the client defines the outcomes. Sometimes you co-design them together. Sometimes the provider defines the outcome unit and prices against it. Each mode maps to a different delivery model — enterprise consulting, digital services, and SaaS at scale.

The incentive inversion. Under per-seat pricing, AI efficiency cannibalizes revenue. Under outcome-based pricing, AI efficiency expands margins. Same technology investment, opposite financial result; all driven entirely by the pricing model. This is why the transition is inevitable.

The KPMG signal. Your clients already have the leverage. KPMG used the existence of AI to pressure their auditor into a 14% fee cut without automating a single thing. That playbook works in every SaaS renewal and every consulting engagement from here forward.

The operational framework. How to establish baselines, choose proxies over pure outcomes to avoid attribution fights, structure layered incentives that reward exceeding targets, and build the data flywheel that compounds your advantage over time.

Why I Wrote This

I’ve been working on outcome-based pricing for years …  not as a theory, but as an operating model. At Cognizant, I led the strategy that shifted our digital business go-to-market from competing on who could build it cheapest to competing on who could deliver the business outcome the client actually needed. We stopped scoping deliverables and started scoping results. The margins followed.

The recent market events — $285 billion in SaaS market cap repriced in 48 hours over a structural pricing argument — confirmed what I’ve been saying: this transition is accelerating, and most companies aren’t ready.

The article is the playbook.

Read the Full Breakdown

The complete article, including the Salesforce case study, the three-mode framework, the operational mechanics, and the argument for why AI makes this model inevitable, is on LinkedIn:

→ Stop Selling Seats. Your Customers Don’t Want Access — They Want Results.

If this is the kind of clarity you need in your business, let’s talk.

→ theproductguy.com

Jeremy Horn (aka The Product Guy) is the founder of The Product Group and The Product Way.

In this Product Excellence clip, Maya Brooks breaks down the three things she believes every great PM does daily. First, know your team. Not just what they are working on, but how they communicate, where they get stuck, and what they need to do their best work. Second, build transparency into your process. Create spaces where people are comfortable sharing blockers, frustrations, and wins without fear. Third, talk to your customers obsessively. Go where they are. If they are at events, show up. If they are in online communities, join them.

Maya is a Product Manager at Klaviyo leading Billing & Monetization (Growth), with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a background as a startup founder and CEO. She also shared how she built these habits from scratch at a 12-person startup, and what changed when she created a process where people were genuinely not afraid to say they needed help.

What You Will Learn

• Why knowing your team matters more than any PM framework
• How to build transparency without adding unnecessary process
• Why the best PMs go where their customers already are

Watch the clip: https://youtu.be/t0lfFHOqX34

Subscribe for weekly interviews with top product leaders: https://www.youtube.com/theproductway/membership

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