Picture this: you’re in a kick-off session for a major project set to propel your company into a new market. The hybrid room buzzes with representatives from various functions – project managers, engineers, customer experience teams and business heads – all united around ambitious deliverables. Excitement fills the air!

Weeks pass, the team pushes through late nights, meetings, and milestones. The project is finally complete – budgets over-extended, timelines reset, and the deliverables are… well, delivered.

A launch party marks the success, and the team moves on, proud. Yet, as the initial excitement fades, problems emerge. Customers don’t engage as expected. Complaints surface. The support team scrambles, and operations – unprepared and underfunded – bears the brunt. The celebrated project turns into a burden, draining resources and harming the company’s reputation. This is the cycle of project-centric delivery.

The Project-Centric Trap: Why Success Can Be Fleeting

Often, projects are measured by the team’s execution velocity, but while the project team hits their milestones, no one is there to consider what happens after launch. The market, as it turns out, doesn’t care about project timelines or completion dates. Customers want solutions that continuously meet and adapt to their needs. They want products that grow with them, and for that, a finish-line mentality simply doesn’t work. 

The truth is the project-centric approach often leaves companies chasing deadlines instead of pursuing real value. Resources are dissolved into “feature factories” pouring into features that may be obsolete by the time they reach customers. And when the project ends, the team disbands, taking their knowledge and insights with them – leaving those responsible for the product with a steep learning curve and a limited budget. 

The net impact? Projects that deliver, but don’t deliver value. Resources that are spent but not invested. Teams that celebrate, but don’t connect with the customer. 

A New Path Forward: Embracing a Product-Market Mindset 

What if companies built around products, not projects? Picture teams dedicated to a product’s lifecycle, adapting to customer feedback and evolving market needs. This reflects the reality of a product – it isn’t time-bound, and it should deliver ongoing value to multiple stakeholders. 

The products that succeed are those that not only solve real problems but also resonate deeply with both internal and external customers. The project-centric model often leaves companies disconnected from what truly matters – it’s not about time-to-market but actually “time-to-value”, and when grappling with evolving markets, value cannot be bound to time-boxed project milestones.  

In embracing a product-market mindset, teams stay with a product. Instead of sprint objectives, this approach resembles a marathon, with milestones that reflect real value – like growing user engagement and increasing headline earnings at business-as-usual capacity, while continuously optimising the product to be responsive to all challenges. 

The Hallmarks of a Product-Market Mindset 

So, what defines a product-market mindset? Here are the key elements of a product-market mindset:  

1. Redefined Success & an Insight-Led Organisation: In a product-market mindset, success is defined by impact. Are customers adopting the product? Is it driving revenue growth or saving costs? By adopting customer-focused metrics and weaving insights into the very fabric of customer interactions and business operations, organisations can measure their success by the internal & external value they deliver over time. 

2. Cross-Functional & Ultra-Collaborative Product Teams: Instead of assembling temporary project teams, create resolute product teams that stay with the product, fostering continuity and a sense of ownership over the product's success. These teams should be cross-functional and highly collaborative, honing in on holistic delivery by bringing together critical skills from product ownership & management, research & design, engineering, and marketing. 

3. Empowered Product Teams: The critical skills needed in a cross-functional product team represent different product risks that need to be managed:  

• • Viability risk – managed by product owners and managers, at various levels, i.e. does the product make sense for our business?  

• • Usability risk – managed by UX researchers and UI designers, i.e. can users achieve their goals through the product? 

• • Feasibility risk – managed by engineering in various disciplines, i.e. can we build and sustain the product in our enterprise’s architecture?  

• • Desirability risk – managed by product marketers, i.e. does the product resonate with the end customer or user?  

Intently managing these risks requires decentralised decision-making and leadership creating mandate is crucial for the ongoing success of a product.  

4. Visionary Leadership: Chief executives must lead the charge because the shift from project-delivery focus to a product-market mindset requires more than just operational changes – it demands strategic vision. The C-suite must be committed to a product-first approach and actively communicate and evangelise product vision and outcomes throughout the organisation. Without executive buy-in, any attempt at transformation will lack the momentum needed to succeed. 

What’s Really at Stake?

As you sit in that kick-off session, listening to the structure and deliverables laid out, you realise you've seen this scenario play out before – and recognise that things need to change if the company is to remain relevant. 

Think about this for a moment - when was the last time you had “a Kodak moment”? Kodak’s reluctance to adapt to digital left its core film business obsolete, a classic example of mismanaging the viability risk. Success isn’t about just doing things; it’s about doing the right things, and a product-market mindset keeps this focus sharp. 

Consider an insurance company that relies on field agents to increase policy uptake with paper-based onboarding – without providing mobile printing support. How can agents meet their goals this way? This is the usability risk in action, where a product fails to meet the user’s needs. 

Or take mining: the challenge of extracting valuable minerals while balancing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors illustrates the possible breadth of the feasibility risk. 

And then there’s the desirability risk. Think about banks that encourage customers to make them their main bank, where banks reap benefits like increased liquidity. Yet many customers remain multi-banked, perhaps due to brand mistrust, pricing, or poor delivery of the product itself. 

Adopting a product-market mindset shifts the focus to what truly matters: creating lasting value that resonates well beyond a project’s launch. Imagine that kick-off session transformed – not buzzing with excitement over fleeting deliverables, but with a team aligned around building something enduring. Instead of setting sights on a finish line, this team commits to a continuous journey, adapting to the market’s every twist and turn, listening to customers, and crafting solutions that evolve alongside them. Each decision they make is aimed not at simply getting a product out the door, but at creating something that becomes indispensable to customers and resilient in a changing world. 

When companies embrace this mindset, they step away from the pitfalls of project-driven churn and step into the world of genuine impact. They’re not just launching products; they’re building foundations for long-term success. In the end, they aren’t left wondering what happened once the hype dies down - they’re poised to thrive, delivering on the promise and vision that filled that kick-off session from the very beginning. 

“Technology has advanced and enabled business transformation at an accelerated rate. The ability to develop new digital tools and business solutions has emphasised the need for a Product Lifecyle Management approach. At BSG our Product Consulting capability helps our clients to understand the ownership, product evolvement, user adoption, and maturity of the solutions developed for business to increase business impact and return on investment.”

Carl Ohlhoff, BSG Industry Leader