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Hello Reader,

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Over the past decade, I’ve worked with dozens of enterprise organizations on their product transformations. Despite different industries, sizes, and starting points, I keep seeing the same pattern: we get buy-in to start the transformation and rally people around the end goal. But when we actually begin the work, we expect to reach that final state quickly, forgetting there are many critical steps in between. We can’t just leapfrog into the advanced state.
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​The Maturity Curve Reality ​
Product management literature (including my own work in Escaping the Build Trap) is great at describing the endpoints but glosses over the messy middle. There are distinct maturity stages between the starting point and that advanced state where you’re measuring outcomes and business impact, each with their own capabilities and prerequisites. You can’t skip them.

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Organizations that try to leap directly from measuring story points to measuring market share impact inevitably fail - not because the vision is wrong, but because they haven’t built the foundational capabilities required to operate that way. I’ve been describing these stages as Nascent, Emerging, Developing, and Advanced to help explain to leaders there is a journey.

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The difference between the Nascent stage and the Advanced stage is fundamental to how decisions get made, how resources get allocated, and how success gets defined. But the path between them? That’s where the real work happens.

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The vision alone isn’t enough - we need to understand what it actually entails before we can get there. I’ve seen too many transformations fail because organizations jump straight to implementing the tools of the Advanced stage without doing the foundational work first.

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Here’s a common example: Organizations in the Nascent stage implement OKRs, writing down what they believe are “outcomes.” But they haven’t defined what an “outcome” actually means in their context. These OKRs aren’t backed by data. Product managers and leaders don’t understand how they contribute to these outcomes or how to measure their impact. The framework exists, but the underlying capabilities don’t.

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Before you can scale outcome-based practices, you need organizational clarity on what outcomes mean, how you’ll measure them, what data you’ll use, and how individual contributors and leaders contribute to them. The middle stages exist to build these capabilities—you can’t skip them.

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Meeting Your Organization Where It Is

If your organization operates in the Nascent stage, you’re not alone. Many large enterprises are here today. The critical question is: Are you prepared to execute a genuine transformation, or will you settle for cosmetic changes that rename roles without rebuilding capabilities? The work you need to do depends entirely on where you are today. You can’t scale what you don’t have buy-in for. What looks like slow progress in the early stages is actually essential foundation-building.

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If you’re in the Nascent stage, focus on definition and alignment: establishing your vision for product management at the company, creating a common language, defining ownership at each level, and running pilot programs to demonstrate value. You cannot scale what people don’t understand or believe in yet.

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If you’re more mature, with good alignment on why we want this transformation, and a focus on more value based metrics - shift your focus to scale and enablement: for example, streamlining customer feedback loops, standardizing governance processes, and building systems that help teams operate consistently.

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The transformation begins with honest assessment of current state and systematic work to build the specific capabilities your stage requires.
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If you need help, just reach out.

Until next time, Melissa Perri Founder Product Institute, Board Member, and Teacher

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