It is the discipline of discovering, proving and driving the commercial value and growth of a business. Everything below follows from that fundamental truth — and we've been proving it in the field, and writing about it, since 2018.
If you're asking your product function delivery-status questions, you're likely failing. If the discussion is about opportunity and value, you're on the right track.
Most organisations quietly treat product as a delivery function — a team that turns decisions other people made into shipped features. This is the single most expensive and common mistake a business will make with its product capability.
Product exists to pinpoint exactly where commercial opportunity lies, validate market-beating solutions to seize it, and drive teams to deliver outcomes at pace. Shipping is the visible by-product. Value is the point. A product team measured on output is optimising the wrong thing; a product team measured on the growth and value it creates is a business's most powerful engine.
Everything a product team does should ladder to the vision: the problems it solves become the objectives it meets, those objectives become the goals it hits, and those goals drive the business's ultimate aim. When that line is clear, everyone knows why their work exists. When it isn't, people are busy and lost at the same time.
Product is a commercial role. If your product people can't 'sell', they can't be in product.
We don't mean this as a provocation — we mean it literally. The experience is the proposition. The product's capabilities are its sales features. A product person who can't articulate what the business sells, to whom, why they'll buy, and what it's worth, is not equipped to decide what to build. They will build into "the unknown ether" — into internal opinion and personal preference — rather than into demand.
And it is product-market fit: the market half is marketing. A product leader who can't think like a marketer — who doesn't own the proposition, the positioning and the whole customer journey, but only the build — controls just half of what makes a product win.
We start from where the commercial opportunity actually is — not from what someone wishes the product were. Strategy begins with the market, the opportunity, your right to win — and not the backlog.
Every roadmap item traces to a validated demand source. Assumed product-market fit is not product-market fit. And we deal in problems and assumptions, not requirements: a requirement is a stakeholder's guess frozen into a spec; an assumption is a licence to be wrong, quickly. Ruling one out isn't failure — it's the cheapest learning you'll ever buy.
We frame every product decision in the language of the business: revenue, margin, enterprise value. Product that can't connect its work to the P&L, the valuation or the sales motion has lost the plot. This is why product people must be able to sell — and to market.
Customer adoption and measurable results beat shipped functionality, every time. A feature nobody adopts is a cost, not an achievement. And technology is an enabler, not the answer: in almost every case a product challenge is a customer and commercial problem first, and a technology problem a distant second.
One primary metric, two or three secondaries — not a dashboard to hide behind. A goal isn't a deliverable or a vague ambition like "improve the experience" — it states where the business needs to be, and by when, to keep winning. And we'd rather reset a target early than report against a figure we were never going to hit. Honest red beats dishonest green.
The root cause of most stalled products is that nobody actually owns the result — only the tasks. Product leadership means carrying the number, not managing the queue.
The product is the visible output; ways of working, culture and governance are what make value repeatable. We build product functions that become better and more valuable as they scale — not ones that simply get bigger, busier and more expensive. Scale that increases unit cost isn't scale.
Always go fast, always look ahead, trust the execution — but never confuse motion with progress. We move quickly because we're building on evidence, not instead of gathering it.
It is product-market fit, and the market half is marketing. Great product leaders own the whole customer lifecycle, not just the thing that gets built — and every stage of that lifecycle is a promise: the proposition is the promise you make; conversion is the promise reinforced; onboarding is the promise kept; retention is the profitable relationship it becomes. The prize isn't acquisition or retention in isolation; it's acquiring retention — winning the customers who stay and pay back.
Product leadership is becoming commercial and operational leadership. The narrow "head of the backlog" definition is dying. We think it should. Product leadership is business leadership, or it isn't leadership at all.
Growing companies are finally rejecting shipping-as-success. The emphasis has moved decisively toward customer adoption and measurable outcomes over the release of new functionality. This is not a trend to us — it's principle four, and it's been the way we've operated all along.
The market is moving toward what we've always stood for — and have been writing about and delivering since 2018. That's our right to win.
When Double Six assesses, builds or leads a product function, we hold it to this standard: a team that discovers real opportunity, proves it commercially, drives adoption and growth, owns the outcome, and can sell and market what it builds. That is what effective product looks like. Anything less is a delivery function wearing a product title — and we'll say so.
And the hardest thing to be, inside any organisation, is impartial. Internal politics and personal incentive quietly bend decisions away from value. It's why the sharpest product judgement is so often brought in from outside: not because internal teams lack talent, but because an operator with no stake in the internal game can say the true thing. That's the role we play.
It's the one we love most. If product in your business looks more like a delivery team than a growth engine, let's talk about it.
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