Why Product-Led Growth (PLG) Fails in Big UK Organisations - and How to Do It Properly
- Darren Emery
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
A Reality Check for the C-Suite
Every FTSE100 boardroom wants PLG outcomes - but very few want the organisational surgery required to get there. The same pattern shows up across banks, insurers, telcos, retailers, and even large public-sector bodies.
If you’re a COO, CIO, CTO or CEO in a mid-to-large enterprise, you’ve probably heard the promise of product-led growth (PLG): lower Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), double the revenue growth, and a product that sells itself.
But the truth is: most established companies trying to “go full PLG” from a traditional, project-based, sales-led culture fail. It’s not because PLG doesn’t work - it's because they aren't ready for it.
They treat PLG like a tactical initiative, rather than a deep operating-model transformation. The result? Frustration, misalignment, wasted budget, and more failed pilots than wins.
Because the real challenge isn’t embracing product led growth as an aspiration.
It’s recognising that your organisation - structurally, culturally, politically - probably isn’t ready to go full PLG yet.
And pretending otherwise is how large enterprises burn time, money, credibility… and the goodwill of their best people.
What if instead you framed PLG as a journey - a multi-stage evolution - one that respects where you are now, but sets a clear path toward where you could be?
That’s what this article is about.
Product-Led Growth Matters - But Not How You’ve Been Sold It
Let’s get one thing straight: product led growth works.
The data is clear:
58% of B2B SaaS companies now employ PLG strategies.
PLG companies often report 40% lower customer acquisition costs and double the revenue growth rate compared to traditional models.
The numbers are real. The benefits are real.
But the conditions that make them possible are not (yet) real inside most UK mid-to-large enterprises.
Most incumbents still operate through:
annual budgeting cycles
project-led funding
centralised governance
legacy technology
siloed functions
sales-led roadmaps
and increasingly, delivery roles stretched thin just to keep the lights on
What PLG is not:
A new funnel in the marketing team
A feature in the product backlog
A campaign handled by Growth
A rebranding of Product Management
PLG is an organisational rewiring, not a tactic.
It only works when the operating model itself is designed to support it - not when it’s treated as a bolt-on initiative.
A Failed Example from Banking: Why “Go Full PLG” Backfired
Let me tell you about a large bank (you've almost certainly read about similar initiatives) that tried to pivot to product-led growth, but without shifting underlying organisational behaviours and systems.
This bank launched a “digital product division” to compete with the fintechs. On paper, they rolled out a slick app, freemium-like features, and mobile-first experiences. But underneath, the core banking systems were rigid monoliths - every product change required deep integration work, large batch deployments, and manual approvals.
Moreover, decision-making and governance remained heavily siloed. Compliance and risk processes followed old lines; innovation teams lacked autonomy; deliverables were still tied to quarterly budgets and traditional KPIs. As a result, the digital product failed to gain traction.
One report found that active users were dramatically below target.
In short: they tried PLG without becoming product-led. The culture, systems, and decision-making remained fundamentally sales- or project-led. That’s a recipe for failure.
The lesson? You can’t bolt a PLG strategy onto a project-led organisation and expect it to behave differently.
Why PLG Isn’t a Switch - It’s a Journey
You cannot simply flip the switch from project-led silos to a product-led growth engine. That path skips the foundational work and invites disaster.
Instead, you need to evolve through four critical stages of maturity:
Foundational maturity:
Create empowered, cross-functional product teams. Decouple architecture and reduce systemic dependencies.
Operating Model Reinforcement:
Shift funding, governance, planning, and decision-making to support continuous, outcome-based product development.
Growth engine:
Introduce experimentation, self-serve funnels, robust data and metrics and product growth learning loops.
Product-led scale:
The product genuinely becomes the core sales engine (acquisition, activation, and retention), with all teams aligned on long-term customer value, not just delivery quotas.
Trying to jump straight to Stage 4 is the biggest mistake UK and global enterprises make.
It's like expecting a team to win the Premier League before they've mastered basic ball control.
The Product Operating Model Reality Check
Many enterprises copy the structures of a product operating model - tribes, squads, OKRs, product roles - but keep the behaviours of a project organisation.
What follows is predictable:
Delivery responsibilities redistributed into product teams
Fewer Delivery Managers on the org chart
But the same dependencies, bottlenecks, and governance patterns
If you transplant the rituals but not the conditions, you get the theatre of product - not the benefits of product-led growth.
You can’t deliver product-led growth with a project-led operating model - the physics simply don’t match.
The Evolution of Delivery: Don't Eliminate, Re-Focus
A common mistake in the PLG transition is the premature assumption that Delivery Managers or Project Managers are obsolete.
There's a big, bold announcement: “We’re moving delivery responsibilities into the product teams.We won’t need as many Delivery Managers anymore.”
In theory, this makes perfect sense.
In a genuine product-led environment - empowered cross-functional teams, clear strategy, coherent architecture - delivery becomes a team competency, not a standalone role.
But in 99% of large enterprises today, this condition does not exist.
Most large organisations still operate in an environment with:
dependencies everywhere
legacy systems that resist change
governance gates that slow momentum
unclear ownership
demand that massively outweighs capacity
strategic intent that never quite translates into execution
And in that environment, Delivery Managers aren’t redundant - they’re essential.
They create flow, surface risks, establish clarity, and translate strategic intent into workable delivery. They make the organisation actually executable.
So the real question isn’t:
“Do we still need Delivery Managers?” but “Have we created the conditions where Delivery becomes genuinely optional?”
Train PMs and Engineers in flow basics, focus Delivery Managers on systems, clarity and coaching, and transition ownership gradually.
Tangible Steps to Begin Your Journey
For COOs, CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs, your role is to create the conditions in which product-led growth can work. These steps give you a pragmatic, sequenced path - not hype, not theory, but executive actions that move the organisation toward PLG maturity.
Once you stop treating PLG as a structural shortcut and recognise it as a capability journey, you can begin sequencing the transformation properly.
1. Audit Your Current Operating Model
Map how product, delivery, compliance, security, and finance currently interact. Identify bottlenecks, duplicated effort, dependency hotspots, and governance friction.
Run a PLG readiness workshop with your leadership team to assess gaps in systems, culture, architecture, capabilities, and data.
Executive takeaway: You can’t become product-led until you understand the organisational forces that currently prevent it.
2. Reframe Funding and Planning
Transition from annual project-based budgets to product-aligned value streams or rolling investment cycles.
Establish a lightweight innovation fund to support experiments, quick wins, and cross-functional discovery work without bureaucratic delays.
Executive takeaway: If you fund projects, you get outputs; if you fund products, you get outcomes.
3. Build the Product Team Foundation
Form durable, cross-functional product teams with real agency - product, design, engineering, data, compliance, and delivery capability redistributed where appropriate.
Align teams with outcome-based OKRs focused on user value and measurable impact, not just delivery activity.
Executive takeaway: Cross-functional does not mean 'developers with a Product Owner'. It means the minimum skills required to deliver value end-to-end without waiting on another department. PLG only works when teams have the autonomy, skills, and mandate to act like product teams, not feature factories.
4. Modernise Your Architecture
Break monoliths where possible; invest in APIs, modular systems, event-driven patterns, and automation that reduce dependency chains.
Prioritise critical legacy modernisation. Even partial extraction or lift-and-shift can dramatically improve cycle time.
Executive takeaway: Without architectural mobility, PLG becomes a PowerPoint strategy, not an operational reality.
5. Embed Data and Learning Loops
Define and implement essential product metrics: activation, retention, time-to-value, PQLs, engagement, and expansion indicators.
Begin structured growth experiments: onboarding flows, value moments, self-serve improvements, pricing tests, and behavioural nudges.
Executive takeaway: PLG is impossible without real-time insight into how users behave and where value is created or lost.
6. Align Governance and Incentives
Redesign governance to support speed: fewer gates, lighter approvals, clearer accountability, and faster feedback loops.
Shift performance incentives from output (features shipped) to outcomes (customer value, adoption, retention, quality).
Executive takeaway: If governance rewards predictability over learning, PLG will die on contact with the organisation.
7. Sponsor and Scale
Appoint a senior PLG champion in the C-suite - someone able to protect product teams from quarterly noise, political interference, and budget volatility.
After proving success with a few well-chosen pilots, refine the operating model and scale intentionally across more products.
Executive takeaway: PLG doesn’t scale from enthusiasm - it scales from sponsorship, consistency, and disciplined expansion.
Why This Matters (for COOs, CIOs, CTOs, CEOs)
Sustainable growth: PLG can dramatically lower CAC and improve retention, but only if done right.
Strategic alignment: By changing how you plan and fund, you align your organisation around long-term value, not just quarterly delivery.
Risk reduction: A phased journey mitigates the risk of big-bang failure (like in that banking example).
Competitive advantage: Investing now builds organisational capability and maturity. When your competitors are still “trying PLG as a campaign,” you're already operating at scale.
Conclusion: Why You Need to Think Big - But Act Practically
To nail product-led growth, you need to think like a strategist and act like a delivery expert. Yes, the potential is huge: lower CAC, faster scaling, higher retention. But if you try to jump straight into PLG without building the right foundation, you're almost certain to stumble.
As leaders (COOs, CIOs, CTOs, CEOs), your job isn't just to endorse PLG - it’s to design the conditions where PLG can succeed. That means rethinking funding, architecture, governance, teams, and incentives. It means insisting that PLG is not a marketing tactic or a side project: it’s the next phase of your operating model.
If you’re ready to start, we can help you map your PLG journey. We can assess readiness, run experiments, build your roadmap, and help you avoid the all-too-common failures. If you want to run a workshop to kick this off, get in touch.
The next wave of UK enterprise winners won’t be the ones who adopt PLG fastest - they’ll be the ones who adopt it properly.
PLG isn’t a leap of faith - it’s a disciplined evolution. Your competitors will try to shortcut it. You don’t need to. Start the journey properly, and you can scale what they can only imitate.
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