A product organisation should be articulated in a way that helps founders steer their organisation through building, improving, renewing, and innovating. It should help founders navigate scaling and re-imagining their product line.
While some product operating models are optimised for building only, and others for disrupting only, moving from one focus to another often requires changing the CEO, founder, or completely restructuring the company. This is what I call a 1-mode product operating model.
Other rare types of organisations are structured in a way that the focus can change dynamically without having to go through heavy restructuring every time:
add new Features
create Experience people could never think about
push technical boundaries
This is what I call a 3-mode product operating model.
This is what enabled Apple to create the iPod, iPhone, and iPad while continuously improving its other products. This is also what enabled Apple to survive Steve Jobs.
Here are three examples:
When focusing on developing the right technologies: You need a balanced approach where Marketing tracks market evolution, Design maps future usage and future customer behaviors, and Engineering identifies emerging technologies. It is precisely this three-way conversation that drives the right prioritisation for technology development.
When your technology is close to maturity: You have the opportunity to redefine the market with a disruptive product. To achieve that, you must give strategic authority to your design team over the product direction.
When your disruptive product is already on the market: You have captured early adopters and now need to release features to grow your customer base. To do that, you must let Product Marketing lead the product evolution.
Now let’s see how Nokia operated in the same situation
Investing in technology: Because you lack a clear usage roadmap, you have no idea what is actually relevant, leading to poor prioritisation or trying to build absolutely everything.
Technology integration: Because the product vision is to develop new "stuff", you continuously stack new features onto your existing lineup, creating a proliferation of Frankenstein products: the seed of the feature factory.
Failing to disrupt: You will never disrupt the market because technologies are merely being added without reconsidering what has been built so far.
And this is how you end up with a sea of incremental device variants.
The AI Parallel: History Repeating Itself
Tech companies operate through different product operating models than Nokia, yet they face similar difficulties. This happens because classic product management simply adds a customer understanding layer on top of a legacy way of working (see my newsletter “3 Reasons Why Classic Product Management Is Inspired by the Assembly Line”).
The proof? The emergence of artificial intelligence is producing the exact same paralysis.
AI represents a fundamental interface shift. ChatGPT has been in the wild since 2022. Yet, if you examine how most software products integrate AI today, almost every interface remains command-based—driven by static buttons, dropdowns, and form fields. Virtually no one has successfully deployed a truly intent-based, AI-native interface. Maybe Sir Jony Ive will solve it.
Most companies are victims of the "Build Trap", and while Melissa Perri, who coined the term, promotes improving the current system, I suggest replacing it entirely and designing one around the founder's leadership style and vision.
What do you think? Does this organisational anomaly have to remain an exception, or do you think businesses should fundamentally change their paradigm?
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Jean
