Change in product management is rarely a technical problem alone. It’s social, political and — crucially — narrative. If you’ve ever tried to nudge a product operating model into a large organisation, you’ll recognise the strange math: brilliant ideas + internal resistance = inertia. A recent piece on Cutlefish about Marty Cagan and the SVPG approach (linked below) nails a powerful truth: the way you frame change for executives can be the difference between a pilot and a movement. Here’s what that means in practice, and what product leaders should do next.
Why SVPG’s framing works
SVPG succeeds because it doesn’t start by shaming leaders for past choices. Instead, it offers leaders a story where they remain the hero — while simultaneously raising the bar. That’s persuasive. Humans (yes, even senior executives) are identity-driven: tell them they’re the kind of leader who takes product seriously and you’ve given them social permission to act.
Three short knowledge points:
- Peer signalling matters: executives move when they see respected peers or recognised consultancies doing the same.
- External legitimacy opens internal doors: a trusted outside voice reduces the political risk of change.
- Framing beats friction: you can be technically right and culturally ignored — unless your message lands in the leader’s language.
Credit: the original analysis is from a John Cutlefish piece on SVPG’s approach and SVPG’s own materials.
Lesson for internal change agents: timing, messenger, and modesty
If an external voice can open the door, what should you do inside? First, accept that you’re often not the messenger who creates the initial momentum. That’s not failure; it’s strategy. Watch the social currents your executives are tracking — conferences, analysts, peer moves — and align your asks with those signals.
Second, resist the temptation to make the first pitch a full excavation of your organisation’s dysfunction. That mess will reveal itself in time; early on, simplicity and aspiration move hearts.
Operational constraints are the real blockers
Technical capability and coaching matter, but they rarely win on their own. The SVPG analysis and many transformation practitioners point to structural blockers: limited deploy rights, poor instrumention, gate-heavy customer access, and perverse incentives. These are not “people problems” — they are operational constraints that make good product practice impossible.
Take ING’s agile transformation as a concrete example. ING’s shift to squads and tribes was successful because it combined an inspiring narrative with deliberate structural fixes: empowered teams, adjusted funding mechanisms, and new ways to measure outcomes. Read more: ING’s agile transformation (McKinsey). That combination — story plus structural changes — is what turns pilots into scale.
Practical steps product leaders can take tomorrow
Here are pragmatic moves that work inside large organisations:
- Map the executive narrative. Which peers, analysts, or vendors carry weight in your leadership’s world? Use those frames to make the case rather than inventing a new language.
- Quick wins that remove friction. Fix the obvious constraints first: faster deployment pipelines for one or two teams, streamlined customer access for discovery, or a “dashboard unblock” so teams can actually see outcomes.
- Create safe experiments that let leaders keep face. Frame pilots as “modernisation” or “business continuity” where possible. Let leaders publicly claim success while the organisation learns the harder lessons behind the scenes.
- Make the operational debt visible. Build a short, non-technical catalogue of structural blockers and tie each to the business impact. Budget conversations become easier when you can show how a CI/CD pipeline or data access reduces time-to-value.
- Invest in middle managers and operations partners. People whose job is to remove friction — operations, platform, legal liaisons — are multiplier roles. Treat them as product customers.
Balancing the fast and the slow
SVPG’s approach is intentionally aspirational and executive-friendly. That’s useful. But it’s not the whole story. There’s also a slower, more systemic path that focuses on sensemaking, learning and repairing trust. Product leaders need to hold both truths: use executive-friendly narratives to open doors while quietly doing the messy systems work that makes transformation durable.
What success looks like — and how to measure it
Outcomes, not outputs, obviously. But in practice, that means measuring the right leading indicators:
- Reduced time from idea to validated learning
- Increased percentage of teams with direct customer access for discovery
- Reduction in approvals needed for deployment
- Clear funding alignment between teams and business outcomes
Each metric ties back to a structural change. If you can’t deploy without five sign-offs, you won’t get fast learning. If engineers are rewarded for individual velocity rather than shared outcomes, you’ll get local optimisation, not systemic value.
Parting thought
If SVPG has given product leaders a language that executives can hear, use it. Let external legitimacy open the door. Then get to work on the less glamorous engineering and operational fixes that let empowered teams actually deliver. The first step is rarely perfect nuance; it’s getting permission to begin. After that, the hard but necessary work of constraint-smashing, measurement, and steady leadership begins. If you can pair an executive-friendly story with concrete, visible changes to how work gets done, you’ll transform more than process — you’ll change the organisation’s capacity to learn.
Further reading: The Cutlefish piece that inspired this post: The Genius of SVPG. SVPG: svpg.com.
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