Successful Product-Led Transformation Requires These Three Things

Photo credit: Josh Calabrese

In today’s fast-moving world, being “product-led” isn’t just a trendy buzzword—it’s a strategic imperative. But, transitioning to a product-led organization requires more than new tools or team restructuring; it demands a profound cultural shift. For legacy companies, this transformation can feel like changing a car tire while speeding down the highway. Old habits and cultural inertia can pose significant challenges, stalling even the best-intentioned efforts.

Strategy and technology might initiate a product-led transformation, but it’s people and culture that ultimately determine success. Missteps can lead to cultural chaos, missed opportunities, and a disjointed identity, jeopardizing commercial viability and the ability to attract and retain top talent. Here are three keys to building the cultural foundation and unified strategy your company needs to thrive in a product-led environment.

Define What You Stand For

Before diving into transformation, establish a clear sense of identity. What does your company represent, and what aspects of its legacy are worth preserving? Change without continuity breeds chaos. Employees, customers, and even competitors should clearly understand what your company is carrying forward and what it’s leaving behind.

Too often, legacy companies skip this step, assuming their identity is implicit. Without a shared understanding of “why,” transformation efforts can feel aimless, leading to resistance, wasted time, and burnout. Strike a balance: preserve what makes your company exceptional while evolving outdated practices to unify your approach moving forward.

I was a product leader at Forbes, a legacy publisher more than a century old that started feeling pressure from shifts in digital publishing. Navigating the dynamic realities of a changing ad environment and the evolution of reader habits and expectations made it clear that we couldn’t just tweak around the edges. It was time for a bold shift toward consumer revenue.

That meant experimenting with everything: subscriptions, memberships, paid newsletters, niche content offerings and more. The product possibilities were exciting, but real transformation meant more than launching new features. It also meant redesigning the site experience to support the kinds of user behaviors that would make those offerings work. And maybe most importantly, it meant a cultural shift to reshape how we worked, what we prioritized, and how we made decisions. Editorial, product, revenue, and a newly formed growth team all had to align around a single, unshakable principle: what do we stand for?

The answers—excellence in journalism, innovative partnerships, leadership in our space, and a brand legacy worth preserving—established our North Star. That clarity became our compass, and every experiment, feature, and trade-off had to support that foundation. It helped us make tough calls, stay focused, and drive change without losing what made the brand matter in the first place.

In product-led transformation, clarity on what you stand for is cultural infrastructure.

Be Willing to Say No… A Lot

Saying no is a superpower in product-led organizations, and sometimes it requires a critical cultural shift. Throughout our transformation at Forbes, we ran into a familiar problem for product teams: everyone had a “must-do” project or a thing that must not change. Stakeholders across the org insisted their asks should take priority. And saying no? It felt like stepping on landmines, especially for people on the front lines.

But we knew that building a consumer revenue engine—and the products and infrastructure to support it—meant we couldn’t chase everything. We had to avoid diluting our focus and impact. Saying no, often and intentionally, is how to stay aligned with your product vision and long-term goals. That doesn’t mean it’s easy because the pressure to please stakeholders is real.

We created a cadence of senior-level meetings designed not just for updates, but for alignment. These weren’t just check-ins—they were opportunities to reinforce strategy, surface trade-offs, and back our respective teams when they needed to deprioritize or push for something. 

At the same time, we worked with our product managers on how to say no without burning bridges—how to balance empathy with clarity, and short-term stakeholder needs with long-term business outcomes.

Saying no isn’t about resistance. It’s about making room for what really drives the strategy forward. And when leadership models that discipline, teams feel empowered to do the same.

Create Space for Experimentation

Product-led transformation can’t happen without experimentation—and that means creating a culture where learning is valued as much or more than always getting it right out of the gate.

Legacy companies often struggle here. Risk aversion and perfectionism can be deeply ingrained, and the pressure to “get it right” can lead to slow, lengthy development cycles, bloated roadmaps, and high-stakes launches that leave little room for adjustment without jeopardizing delivery. Ironically, avoiding risk in this way only increases it.

The antidote? Encouraging a test-and-learn mentality. Make it safe for teams to experiment, fail, and try again. Build systems that support rapid iteration and continuous feedback. Encourage small, low-lift bets that lead to big insights.

When failure is treated as a source of learning—not blame—innovation can actually take root and flourish. Product-led cultures don’t just allow for experimentation; they depend on it.

Cultural Change as a Competitive Advantage

Product-led transformation isn’t just a strategic shift—it’s a mindset shift. Legacy companies that embrace the right cultural changes, while staying grounded in their identity, can do more than keep up, they can shape the future.

Empowering innovation, fostering collaborative alignment, and building trust cultivate energized and engaged teams and keep the entire organization moving in sync. It’s what turns solid strategies into exceptional outcomes.

Remember, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Start there—and let it fuel everything that follows.