Case study · Leadership & people
From Feature Factory to Outcome Ownership
I shifted a lead-generation scale-up from solution-led planning to empowered teams, improving delivery flow before achieving 28% revenue growth and 29% gross-margin growth in 2023.
The context
When I took over product, the organisation was growing fast and strongly sales-driven. Product owners mainly facilitated stakeholder requests, and roadmap discussions tended to focus on which solutions to build. Frequent ad-hoc requests made it harder for teams to focus on underlying business problems.
The challenge
My goal was to help leadership steer on what we wanted to achieve rather than what we wanted built, while giving teams genuine ownership of business outcomes.
How I approached it
I proposed that the leadership team steer through OKRs and introduced a triple-diamond way of working. Leadership would define the business metric that needed to move—for example, a rising return rate that was constraining revenue growth—rather than prescribe a solution.
Teams then investigated the underlying causes with customers, developed an appropriate response, and measured during rollout whether the target metric moved. We also set explicit guardrails: in this example, returns needed to decrease without harming revenue.
To support the operating-model change, I gave each product owner personal development goals that helped them grow towards a broader product management role. This enabled them to move beyond facilitating requests and take greater responsibility for discovery, prioritisation, and outcomes.
What it delivered
Flow metrics improved first because teams could identify and remove their own bottlenecks, particularly ad-hoc stakeholder requests. Revenue then grew by 28% and gross margin by 29% in 2023. Because target metrics were defined before each initiative, we could attribute improvements more clearly at the initiative level.
The organisation’s language shifted from deadlines and features to accountability for outcomes. Ad-hoc requests now went through the same prioritisation as everything else, which worked because the leadership team actively championed the new approach.
Looking back
I learned that moving from feature delivery to outcome ownership requires more than a new framework. It depends on leadership actively championing the change, defining target metrics and guardrails before work begins, and giving teams room to investigate causes and shape responses. I would make those expectations explicit even earlier, especially for ad-hoc requests.
The principle I carry forward is simple: leadership should set the business outcome, while teams own discovery, prioritisation, and delivery. Supporting people’s development is part of that shift. When product owners were helped to broaden their role, accountability changed alongside the language, and improved flow made stronger business results easier to understand.