Product Agility

Chris Compston: Making the Product Shift: From Project Thinking to Organizational Capabilities - Productized 2025 TalkInTen

• Ben Maynard, Ryan Lane, Chris Compston

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Product Agility — Live from Productized, Lisbon
We're thrilled to record at the excellent Productized conference in Lisbon, Portugal - a world-class gathering that consistently brings together the sharpest product minds. We’re honoured to partner with Productized for this series and grateful to our sponsor, Bobcats Coding, for making these Lisbon conversations possible.

In this Talk-in-Ten episode, we sit down with Chris Compston to unpack the real work behind shifting from a project mindset to a product operating model, and why organisational capabilities are the muscle every product org needs to build and sustain.

Key topics discussed

  • Why the shift from project to product often stalls
  • The 16 organisational capabilities that matter for product orgs
  • Principles: strategic alignment, value-driven work, outcome focus, and financial accountability
  • Practical signs a team is capable (or not) of scaling ideas
  • How to link product work to business impact - make, save, acquire, engage, protect

Guest bio:

Chris Compston — Product leader and speaker focused on helping organisations shift from project to product operating models. Chris works with executive teams to define the capabilities required to be outcome-driven, strategically aligned, value-focused and financially accountable. His talks distil decades of experience into practical frameworks teams can use to change behaviour and sustain product practices.


Ryan Lane — CTO at Bobcats Coding, supporting this Lisbon series. Bobcats Coding is a Budapest and Lisbon-based digital product studio that specialises in AI engineering and end-to-end product development. Download their AI economics guidebook at bobcatscoding.com.

Thanks to our sponsor — Thank you to Bobcats Coding for supporting this Productized Lisbon series and helping us bring these conversations to life.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Welcome to the Product Agility podcast where we explore the ever changing world of product leadership and org design, helping you navigate complexity and build better outcomes for your people and your customers. This week we're coming to you live from Lisbon for the third year in a row at the Productize conference where I'm grabbing 10 minute conversations with product thinkers, leaders and innovators from around the world. These quick fire chats are all about what's shaping our industry right now, from AI and product strategy to the human side of building great products. Now a huge thank you goes out to Bobcatz Coding for making this Lisbon series possible. Bobcats is a Budapest and Lisbon based digital product studio specializing in AI engineering and end to end digital product development. They're also on a mission to educate the market, exploring a new topic every six months and this fall is no exception. Their latest AI economics guidebook is out now and you can download it for free@bobcatscoding.com now here's your Talk in 10. We've got another Talk in 10 for today, day two at Prototypes 2025 with Chris Compston, a veteran of Talks in 10. When I say veteran. We did one last year. I didn't. You didn't do one? Ezra did it. We just spoke. So we shared the workshop. And you spoke to. Ah, yeah, no, and I spoke to you long. We spoke downstairs. False memory. But you're not a veteran. Not for this podcast, no, no. But other podcasts, yes. Who's the best podcast host? Oh, that's. That's a tough one. So I host my own. So obviously. Obviously me. Best answer. A podcast with Hugo Frosh. Yeah. Who you're speaking to tomorrow? Actually, yes. There's a podcast where we literally just get on the call and speak for an hour to each other and then publish it. Nice, nice. And you're doing a new podcast soon about with haircuts. Yeah, I'm thinking of it. Yeah. I think it should be a nice approach actually. Get your hair cut while on the podcast. Yeah, I mean haircut dresser conversations, they're apparently quite good. And mine only takes 20 minutes, so I assume everyone else's only takes 20 minutes as well. Okay, perfect. Perfect. Podcast episode length. Anyway, that was not true, but part of our warm up conversation. Chris, it's awesome to be here. And we are joined by Ryan, CTO of Bobcatz. Yes, hello. Great to be here with you. Lovely to have you here. Now Chris, your talk making the product shift give our listeners bit of a flavor for what it is that what they're missing out on if they're not able to be it productised. Yeah. So the talk make the product shift is all about shifting to the product operating model from a more project orientated model. So the classic project to product conundrum. Yes, that's exactly it. And this is something you've got experience in, I take it? Yeah. So I think, to be honest, I've been talking about this quite a lot and I look back over the really the entirety of my career, which is 20 years now, which sounds quite scary to say but even at the beginning I cared a lot more about how teams were operating and try to improve that and that's still what I do today. So I'm working with clients, helping them shift to the product operating model to become more output, outcome focused, value driven, strategically aligned financially. What's the USP of your talk? Because the shifting from project to product is well trodden ground. What is it that makes your talk different? So I talk a lot about and I'll introduce tomorrow, organizational capabilities. These are almost like the muscles that you have to not just build, not just improve and optimize, but sustain over a long period of time for you to be able to say we are now a product company and we're building products using a product operating model. What I've tended to find over probably the past, I don't know, five to six years, everyone does want to become a product company. They want to be leaders, innovators, market leaders. The biggest challenge is that even though there's a lot of ambition, yes, we want to become more outcome focused and there's a lot of effort on the ground to try and make that work. These two things are really disconnected and organizational capabilities are the things I think, I believe are the things that once you focus on them it helps you to shift towards that product operating model. Capability is one of my favorite words because I think that it's just something that's forgotten about. I'm doing some work with some leaders over the rest of the year actually on their strategy and for the first time we're challenging them to say and this might, sorry if this is news to you guys, but we're going to be tangible. Say, what's the capabilities that you require to be successful next year? Because that is a huge, huge thing and we are in a point in time where I think we are on the cusp of a revolution in the way that we all approach our work. And for bobcats, obviously with AI, what I'm talking about is AI for you guys That's a big deal, right? Yeah, absolutely. Actually, everyone in every function is sort of getting back to basics about how, what are the fundamentals of their work? And I'd be curious, like, how do you see the core function that makes up what this thing we call product is and what's changing, what's staying the same? Yeah. It's interesting that we focus on the word capabilities. Right? And I think a lot of the time when you say capabilities, people think they mean individual capabilities. Am I capable at X, Y or Z in my team as an individual product designer, product manager? And I think we need to raise that up to the organizational level capabilities. Like what is our org good at? And I mean the product org, I don't mean the whole company here, just the product organization. Is the product organization capable of being data informed across the board, across every single team? I think there's so many things. To answer your question, I have 16 of these capabilities. Right? And every single capabilities requires a change in behavior and a change in mindset. And that's the hardest thing to try and achieve over a long term. But I speak about them and again, I'll introduce tomorrow the principles that back up all these capabilities. So I think every single organization needs to be strategically aligned around the needs of the business, value driven around the needs of the customer, outcome focus. So they're driving outcomes for both customers and business and financially impactful. So some accountability for finance and understanding that we are accountable for the impact we have on the business through the work that we do and the return on investment that we generate. So there's those 16 capabilities right across those four different principles. And the work that I do with clients and teams is to focus on the ones they're most challenged with and try to increase capability in that area. And there's some orgs that are great at this, right? There's some that, just to use my previous example, there's some orgs that have been fantastic at being data informed, great, just sustainability, that capability. But they might not be great at, for example, being empowered as a team. Now we need to focus on that. How do we improve our team's empowerment? How do we optimize what we currently have? And I think there's those 16 things that I introduce and each one of them is incredibly challenging to shift. We Spoke with Bruce McCarthy yesterday actually, and he was explaining his take on CPOs and how you need to effectively influence and kind of wrap your arms around lots of the organization because you want to have an impact. And that from a capability perspective, when you find yourself in situations where you are that product person and you want to be having an impact on the business which equates in some way to revenue or something important to you, it's maybe a bit crude, but you're looking at your capabilities to your left and your right and you're like, I don't think think we've got the ability to do this. An example being somebody was talking to a product lead about an idea that they had and the idea had been validated to an extent. But the question is, does that organization have the ability to execute upon that and scale it if necessary? When the answer is no because of lack of capability, do you deal with that, those kind of conundrums? It depends, I think. I think it depends on what we mean there by capability. Like do we have the execution, product delivery, development and delivery capability is slightly different, I think to org level capabilities of do we even understand what our customers are looking for? Can we build them and can we link that to business impact? Slightly different. I would go. I'm just going to take a very quick step back to what you just mentioned because when it comes to business impact, there's only five things that business people care about. It's making money, reducing costs, acquiring new customers, engaging existing customers or increasing shareholder investment value. I think if any team can link any of the work they're doing to one of those five things and they should be able to do that, they should always be able to do that because it's an investment in their team and their people. If they can link it to that, then they're onto a winner to begin with. I think when it comes to product execution and delivery and development of those things, the capabilities I'm talking about are slightly different, they're slightly higher level. It's across the board, org level things like are our teams empowered? Do we have ultimate clarity so that everyone in our team knows that what the strategy of this business and this product is, are we communicating that on a regular basis? That's a bit like on the ground execution. It reminds me when you're saying that about the five things that businesses care about. There's a gentleman called Chris Matz who was one of the, I mean it's a bit nerdy, but he was around with Dan north and Liz Keough when they made behaviour driven development way, way back in like ThoughtWorks times. And he once said that it boils down to three things. Are we making money, are we saving money or are we protecting money? And those that make, save, protect I think is such an easy mantra. Do you know what? I'm going to start using that. I used to work at ThoughtWorks, by the way. Did you? Okay, so I know some of those folks. I. Maybe I'll boil it down out of the three things and I'll start saying that as well. I think that makes sense because it. Just sticks with people. Yeah, it's a lovely mantra. That's what it. Always in threes. Right. My talk even has three things. Like everything has to be threes. It's easy to remember. So your talk, have you given it anywhere else or is this your first kind of run through? This is the third. Third iteration of this particular talk. It's based on previous content, but a whole new narrative and approach. I've spoken previously in Berlin and London with this. So this will be my third time. And not next week, the week after. I'm in Vilnius speaking, opening keynote at a conference there. Vilnius next week? Yes. Oh, mate, I'm there the week after. No, I'm there the week after the week. Not next week, the week after. Okay, let's chat. Yeah, okay, sweet. Okay. I'm a bit of a. Company's got a big dev center out there. So anyway, we'll talk about that later anyway. Okay, awesome. Me and Ezra are both going, so. Yeah, we'll hang out. Yeah, we'll still make. Okay, we'll stop having a personal conversation. We'll take that offline. Thank you so much. Like, time just flies so much. I just feel like there's maybe a lot more we could have explored. But first of all, Ryan, mate, thank you for coming along. You're going to be coming back for another episode later today. Yes, absolutely. Do you know who it is? You know, I think we have like five more or six more on the Sleep together. We're going to be best friends by the end. Chris, thank you very much for coming along. Apologies for mistaking you as a veteran. Not of this podcast, but maybe I will be in the future. Yes. Well, let's hang out in Vilnius and put a plan together. I'll bring my mic along. Anyway, everyone, thank you for listening. Chris, thank you for coming along. Ryan, thank you for being here. This has been yet another talking tenant and we'll be back again at some point in the very near future.



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Ben Maynard

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