In 2011, The New York Times stared down collapsing ad sales and print circulation. Desperate for revenue, executives greenlit a paywall via a conventional IT project. Uptake crawled: just 406,000 digital subscriptions, pulling in $44 million—barely 1.9% of total revenue. Fast forward. The same company now draws half its income from digital offerings like NYT Cooking, Wordle-integrated games, and podcasts such as The Daily. Growth hums above 5% annually, bucking industry contraction. The difference? A pivot to digital product management. Harvard Business Review lays it bare: temporary project squads build systems. Permanent product crews build—and sustain—them.
Ryan Nelson and Thomas H. Davenport, the article’s authors, spotlight this chasm. Projects, whether waterfall relics from the 1970s or agile patches since 2000, boast dismal records. Standish Group pegs global success at 31%. Others whisper 85% outright flops. Why? They chase scope, schedule, budget. Launch happens. Teams scatter. No ownership. No evolution. Users ignored. Change branded ‘scope creep.’ Emerging tech like generative AI? It amplifies the mess without sustained hands.
Digital products flip the script. These are tech-fueled offerings—B2B, B2C, internal tools, blended online-offline—that demand perpetual care. Tech natives mastered this decades ago. Now legacy players follow: ING banks on it. Target retail. Even U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Yet only 8% of enterprises nail the switch. C-suite hesitation dooms most.
McKinsey data hammers home the payoff. Product-focused firms snag 60% higher total shareholder returns. Operating margins? 16% fatter. Time to market shrinks 40-70%. Quality climbs. Tech aligns tighter with business. Employees engage deeper. ‘When companies have a product orientation, they optimize for measurable business impact—such as an increase in revenue—across a longer horizon,’ Nelson and Davenport write.
Take CarMax. Early 2010s pilot: four-person squad, six weeks, Marty Cagan’s guidance. Scaled to over 70 cross-functional teams. Vision: ‘Shop anywhere, finish anywhere.’ Today, 80% of sales tie to digital support. 66% blend online and in-store. 14% pure online. Gen AI summarizes reviews—slashing 11 years of manual toil to months. No-code prototypes speed everything.
Capital One reframed as ‘a technology company that does banking.’ Agile squads from 2013. Snapped up Adaptive Path in 2014 for design chops. Regions Bank birthed GLAD, an anomaly detector. Transaction errors? From 30 minutes to 5 seconds per check. Hundreds of thousands daily. Vista oversees 200 data products. Deployed 120. Automated paid search? 75% ROI bump. Forecasting errors down 20%. Gen AI content generation: 33% of chat sessions. Total: $100 million extra profit.
Projects fund once, milestone-gated. Products draw ongoing cash, keyed to returns, user metrics. Governance swaps delivery audits for outcome probes: customer shifts, learnings, next builds. Language morphs. Tasks become problems. Features, outcomes. Risk eyes value flops—wrong product, lousy usability—not just delays.
But the leap demands grit. Not for one-offs like cloud migrations. Start small. CarMax’s pilots, open houses. Capital One’s early agile. Craft visions. The Times targeted digital media dominance. Teams: product managers, designers, engineers, subject experts. Autonomy reigns. Permanent leaders. Shared APIs, low-code, AI tools. Metrics track engagement, NPS, conversions, unit economics. Multiyear haul. Top buy-in essential.
Recent chatter echoes this. Ant Murphy on LinkedIn predicts AI-powered product management norms by 2026—but warns against blind throws. ROI scrutiny tightens. Product School’s Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia flags 11 shifts from CPO talks: deeper AI weaves, outcome obsession. A Product School analysis from January pulls from live leader insights—no guesses. X threads buzz too. Biren Parekh shares infographics contrasting project grind to product value. Arpit Bhayani warns: no innovation? Engineering devolves to ticket-wrangling.
Legacy firms falter on digital transformations—70% miss marks, per Capicua’s Medium post. Fix? Tie tech to value. Organizational overhaul over tech tinkering. IT services outfits sell hours. Clients crave speed. Engineers, modern flows. Survivors morph projects to platforms—DevOps, agile, MVPs. As Dario Ristić notes on X, margins shrink otherwise.
AI accelerates the pressure. Traditional roadmaps crack under market speed, says DataCore Systems. Competitors drop weekly. Quarterly plans? Obsolete. Hybrid PM blends agile flex with waterfall structure, per Easy Redmine. Platform engineering unburdens devs, letting product squads chase customer logic, K.K. Kaundal argues on X.
So executives face a fork. Cling to projects amid AI whirlwinds. Or build product crews. The Times thrived. CarMax digitized sales. Vista pocketed $100 million. Failures litter the project path—31% wins at best. Products deliver constantly. And improve. ‘Products earn their keep by delivering, and improving, constantly.’
Painful truth. Only 8% succeed at the pivot. But those who do? They own the future.
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