Introducing the Product-Enabled Model
Why Product-Led Strategy Doesn't Work for Everyone
Maybe you work for a company that sells home decor, groceries, sporting goods, craft supplies, books, or some other consumer good, or provides a service like insurance or banking. Maybe your company manufactures make-up, office supplies, pet food, clothing, or electronics. You are (or you work with) product managers who build digital experiences that allow customers to make purchases, set appointments, create accounts, find locations, search for products, and talk to customer support, or internal product managers who make it possible to send out email marketing, process payroll, run financial reports, track inventory, clock in for work, order supplies, or any other employee task.
Congratulations! You work at a company with a product-enabled model, where your product is not the business but a means to drive it, and your role as a product manager is fundamentally different from your SaaS or B2C counterparts.
I bet you’ve read a few product management books and listened to the top podcasts. You’ve probably felt truly inspired or transformed by a workshop filled with brilliant ideas about how to do product management better. But did you go back to the reality of your office and try to explain something like continuous discovery to a room full of nodding heads only to be asked yet again what your 3-year feature roadmap looks like?
Product management is a complicated job no matter where you work, and just when you think you’re doing it “right,” along comes some new mindset shift or framework that promises to change everything. If you work in a product-enabled space, making that change could be difficult and potentially unhelpful. This is because most product management advice assumes or promotes the product-led model, and you’re trying to apply concepts that don’t fit.
So that’s what this Substack is here to do: identify, modify, and promote the best product management practices for the product-enabled business model. First, let’s talk about the model starting with the big idea that underpins all businesses: value exchange.
Value Exchange: The Core of Both Models
The most basic tenet of business is the concept of value exchange.
A customer trades money (sometimes something else) for a business’s goods or services.
The difference between a product-led company and a product-enabled one lies in how that value exchange is structured. In a product-led model, the product is the business. Customers engage directly with the product, and its adoption drives revenue. Think Slack, Zoom, or Spotify—companies where the product experience is the primary sales and marketing tool.
With a product-enabled strategy, the product supports or enhances the business, but it’s not the star of the show. Your customer’s experience might hinge on a mobile banking app, but the revenue comes from financial services, not app downloads. Here, the product exists to enable the broader strategy—making operations more efficient, improving customer loyalty, or opening new channels.
Traditional companies are also product-led, but consider clothing retail as an example: if the product is a shirt, the product-led strategy is the merchandising and marketing of that shirt; someone is focused on pricing, placement, and promotion, but that person is not a product manager the way we use that job title today.
For our purposes, we are specifically talking about technology product management in a product-enabled model.
Who’s Who: Product-Led vs. Product-Enabled Companies
Product-Led: These are the tech-first companies we’re all familiar with. They sell technology or digital experiences to other companies or individuals. They include companies like:
B2C Tech: Netflix, Instagram, Canva, Candy Crush Saga
B2B SaaS: Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce, AWS
In these businesses, the product manager’s job is to build something so compelling and valuable that customers can’t help but sign up, upgrade, and evangelize, and in the case of B2B, so beneficial to the business that it’s difficult to replace.
Product-Enabled: These are the companies where product plays a supporting role, where the core business is selling something other than technology, including:
Traditional Retail: Walmart, Target, IKEA
Manufacturing & CPG: Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Mars, Ford, LG
Banking & Finance: Chase, American Express, Truist
Healthcare: Kaiser Permanente, CVS Health
Restaurants: Chipotle, Inspire Brands, Darden
In a product-enabled company, the product team’s work is essential, but it’s not the growth engine. Instead, it’s about enhancing core operations or making it possible and more effective to market, sell, deliver, and use the core product or service.
The Overlap: Internal Product Management
Even at product-led companies, not every team works on customer-facing experiences. Internal product managers—those building tools for other teams—are participating in a product-enabled model. Their customers are internal users, and their job is to make those teams more effective.
The Differences in Practice
Here are the top 5 differences between product management at product-led and product-enabled companies.
Success Metrics
In a product-enabled model, you probably aren’t using metrics like daily active users (DAU) or annual recurring revenue (ARR) from software subscriptions. Even if you are the product manager for a customer-facing feature—maybe something in e-commerce—your company is much more concerned with attach rate, average order value (AOV), or abandoned cart count. And internally, you may never have good metrics. Aside from the unfortunate fact that getting funded for internal tools is hard, and measurement tools even harder, sometimes your user base isn’t large enough. You’re probably relying on an extrapolated time-to-market reduction, an efficiency measurement, or an internal net promoter score (NPS).
Similarly, defining objectives and key results (OKR) for your product can be more challenging when the success of your product is tied to the success of the company’s core business. Coordinating with other teams to create shared OKRs is a special practice on its own.
Stakeholder Relationships
In a product-enabled environment, stakeholder relationships can be very complex. Not only are your stakeholders coworkers they are also often users. As a product manager you have to balance the conflicting needs and priorities of multiple teams and leaders. It’s challenging to build consensus when everyone has a very unique stake. In a product-led environment, there are also stakeholders, but fundamentally the entire company is marching in the same direction—the goal is to build a marketable and profitable product.
Product-led companies also benefit from being highly technical and product-aware. You’re far more likely to encounter stakeholders in other teams who understand product management because it’s a central—sometimes founding—element of the business. Stakeholders in a product-enabled company might not always understand product management or its role, so part of your job is to educate and evangelize the techniques you use.
Roadmap Priorities and Planning
Traditional companies tend to have traditional approaches to planning, with one-, three-, five-, or even ten-year horizons. You’re not just planning for sprints, you’re aligning with annual budgets, cross-functional initiatives, and broader organizational goals. Teams responsible for the core product or service often need specific timelines and are dependent on your technology roadmap to drive the business. However, in modern product management, we like to espouse a philosophy of agility, smooth pivots, and managing for unknown unknowns; or more simply put, we avoid dates. This makes creating a roadmap that’s practical for product teams and satisfying to business stakeholders incredibly challenging.
The balance between the desire to be helpful and concrete and the inevitable nature of ambiguous product timelines is delicate and requires a different approach than product-led companies. Agile roadmaps with frequent iterations and rapid experimentation are the norm in product-led companies, but that doesn’t make them the “right” way for every product manager.
Understanding Your Customers and Users
A product manager at a B2C tech company might manage a single feature or set of features for a unified use case. There are potentially millions of these external customers who constantly interact directly with the product. At a product-enabled company, if you manage customer-facing experiences, you have a pretty similar situation, but if your users are internal teams, partners, or a mix of external and internal stakeholders, you’re going to have a very different situation.
You’re building tools or platforms that support broader business goals. The user base in a product-enabled model is likely smaller, but your product is probably wider in scope, potentially being an entire platform. This means your users are more diverse in their goals. For example, imagine you’re the product manager for an intranet-type tool used as a company portal for announcements, training material, employee onboarding, task lists, and single sign-on among many other uses. Your user group is large and diverse. You must serve the needs of nearly every department that uses the tool plus the teams that administer the tool, and also meet the requirements for IT infrastructure and security.
Internal product managers also often have a hard time with discovery. A discrete user base means you can’t keep going back to the well for more without disrupting the same people from their jobs over and over. Being able to quickly develop empathy, determine the root cause of problems, and translate business needs into solutions without endless follow-ups is incredibly important.
Innovation Constraints
Sometimes innovation feels impossible at product-enabled companies. More mature businesses tend to be risk-averse, and industries like banking and healthcare operate within tightly regulated environments. Unlike a product-led environment that often encourages greenfield innovation where new ideas can be tested and scaled quickly, managing technology in the product-enabled model means you’re likely navigating legacy systems, entrenched practices, and layers of approval. Gaining traction toward change takes a long time.
Despite the constraints, the opportunity for meaningful impact is huge. Success here requires creativity within constraints, a focus on incremental improvements, and the patience to see long-term initiatives through.
Why This Matters
At product-enabled companies, I’ve seen product management from two sides: as a product manager and as a stakeholder. I’ve seen product managers twist themselves in knots to perform perfect product management while also trying to satisfy the expectations of stakeholders. I’ve watched stakeholders become completely flummoxed by product management teams’ overengineered techniques. Ultimately, product managers get a bad reputation for being difficult gatekeepers who refuse to relax what looks like a stringent dogmatic process to non-product people.
But, I propose that it’s not the product managers’ fault. They’re probably trying to practice a type of product management that simply doesn’t work for them.
Product-enabled strategy is a critical and often underappreciated part of the product management world. By understanding the differences—and owning them—product managers can focus on what really matters: delivering value in the context of the business they’re in. They’re not just optimizing a product, they’re enabling a company to function. This is highly valuable work that deserves customized techniques.