From Projects to Products: How to Rewire Your Organisation for Outcome‑Driven Growth

Why do so many digital initiatives deliver polished dashboards but no lasting change? Because organisations still treat value as a series of projects with end‑dates, not as ongoing products that must earn their place in users’ lives. If you want repeatable innovation and measurable business outcomes, you need to rewire how work, money and accountability flow through the organisation.

1. Stop funding outputs. Start funding outcomes.

Traditional project funding is a blunt instrument: fixed scope, a deadline, and an inevitable hand‑off to operations. The result is delivered features — not sustained user value. Move instead to funding outcomes: clear hypotheses about user behaviour or commercial impact, with time‑boxed adjustments based on evidence.

Practical steps:

• Define 1–2 measurable outcomes for each product team (e.g. reduce onboarding time by X minutes; increase weekly active users by Y%).
• Allocate a discovery and growth budget that teams can use to iterate once initial delivery completes — not a one‑off handover.
• Change approval gates from feature sign‑offs to outcome reviews that judge whether hypotheses were validated.

2. Make the product team the unit of strategy.

Organisations that scale sustainably treat cross‑functional teams as the locus of strategy execution. That means product managers, designers and engineers empowered together to chase outcomes — not siloed into separate departments chasing KPIs that conflict.

This isn’t theoretical. The UK Government Digital Service moved from project delivery to service teams that own a service end‑to‑end; their public Service Manual is a useful reference for creating durable teams that own outcomes and user journeys. See the GOV.UK Service Manual for practical guidance and case examples.

• Give teams explicit ownership of user journeys and associated revenue/cost metrics.
• Limit team size to keep autonomy (remember Amazon’s two‑pizza rule) but ensure clear alignment with strategic objectives — autonomy without alignment is anarchy. Read more about the concept at AWS Executive Insights.
• Use the product trio — PM, designer, tech lead — as the decision forum for trade‑offs and experiments.

3. Invest in product infrastructure and platform thinking.

You can’t expect small teams to move fast if each one is rebuilding the same plumbing. Product‑led firms invest in shared platforms: experiments-as-a-service, telemetry, feature flags, and CI/CD pipelines that remove friction and reduce cognitive load.

Key moves:

• Standardise observability so every team can measure the same user outcomes and compare learnings.
• Productise internal capabilities (payments, auth, analytics) so teams compose rather than rebuild.
• Fund platform teams as product groups with SLAs — treat them as internal customers with outcomes, not utility providers with opaque roadmaps.

4. Protect new ideas from corporate gravity.

Large organisations are excellent at converting innovation into process. The trick is to protect early experiments long enough to surface evidence. A reserved space for rapid testing, with temporary governance exemptions, accelerates learning without undermining standards.

Do this by:

• Running time‑boxed experiments with clear success criteria and exit rules.
• Using lightweight legal and procurement fast‑lanes for pilots so teams can iterate without months of paperwork.
• Creating a sponsorship model where an executive can shield a promising experiment until it proves value.

5. Measure what matters — and make it visible.

Output metrics flatter stakeholders but don’t predict long‑term success. Replace vanity metrics with measures tied to user behaviour and business impact: retention, task completion, conversion per cohort, cost‑to‑serve. Make these metrics visible at the team and leader level.

Practical checklist:

• Three‑tier metrics: input (activity), leading (behavioural change) and lagging (revenue/cost).
• Set risk budgets (e.g. acceptable impact on reliability) so teams can experiment safely.
• Use learning artefacts (short reports, recorded demos) as part of governance rather than long slide decks.

Real‑world tension: the Spotify story

The so‑called Spotify model popularised autonomous squads and tribes, which inspired many organisations to reorganise around teams. But the model was never a plug‑and‑play solution; it needed culture, coaching and strong platform foundations to work. Atlassian’s overview of the approach is a good primer, and numerous post‑mortems since show that without the right investment in shared services and leadership alignment, autonomy fragments into duplication and misaligned priorities. Read an accessible summary at Atlassian on the Spotify model.

The lesson is simple: autonomy without product infrastructure and outcome alignment creates as many problems as it solves.

Where to start, practically

• Run a one‑day executive workshop to convert current project spend into outcome hypotheses.
• Vote to create 3 pilot product teams with clear user problems, funding for 6 months and executive sponsorship.
• Measure progress by validated learning and business impact, not by delivery milestones alone.

Rewiring an organisation from projects to products is not a flip‑switch; it’s wiring habit, funding and leadership to a different north star. But the prize — sustained user value, lower waste, and an organisation that can adapt to changing markets — is worth the effort. Start with small bets, protect the learning, and demand outcomes. If you do that, you will not just deliver features; you will build products people remember and businesses that last.