From banquet to bistro: How the product model is transforming the business of technology

Imagine you’re dining at a high-end restaurant. The chef curates a menu based on seasonal ingredients, evolving culinary trends, and the unique preferences of regulars. The kitchen and front of the house staff work like a seasoned ensemble—refining, iterating, and collaborating daily. The result? A consistently exceptional experience, tailored to its clientele and refined over time.

Now contrast that with a catering operation. Teams assemble just long enough to execute a fixed menu, built for efficiency and repeatability, before disbanding and moving on. It’s serviceable, dependable—but not particularly transformative.

The difference between the two isn’t just flavor. It’s philosophy. And increasingly, that same difference is defining how technology organizations operate.

From projects to products: A structural shift with strategic implications

For decades, IT has operated like a catering company—assembling temporary teams around projects, focused on execution and handoff. But today’s digital economy requires something closer to the fine-dining model: stable, cross-functional teams that stay close to the customer, iterate constantly, and deliver sustained business value.

Shifting from a project to a product operating model may look like a subtle change on paper. In practice, it reshapes everything: how teams are structured, how success is measured, how technology is funded, and how collaboration unfolds across the enterprise.

What changes in a product-based technology?

At the heart of the shift is a simple idea: structure technology teams around business capabilities, not technical functions.

Instead of organizing by skillset—developers here, testers there—product teams are cross-functional by design. They bring together the full lifecycle of expertise required to support a capability like configure-price-quote (CPQ), digital commerce, or fulfillment. They don’t just build software; they own strategy, delivery, iteration, and ultimately, outcomes.

And that last word is key: outcomes. In a project model, teams are measured by what they deliver—how many story points they burn down, how fast they release features. In a product model, the question is different: Did we move the needle on a meaningful business metric?

For a commerce team, that might mean increasing pipeline velocity or boosting conversion rates. For an internal team, success might be defined by time savings, productivity improvements, or reductions in operational risk. Regardless of the domain, the emphasis is the same: value over volume.

Product owners: The quarterbacks of modern tech

Product teams are quarterbacked by product owners—individuals who sit at the intersection of business acumen, technical fluency, and leadership. Whether they come from IT or the business side, their job is the same: maintain a living roadmap that’s responsive to evolving needs, closely aligned to business priorities, and tied to the metrics that matter.

In customer-facing domains, that means working with revenue-generating teams to identify growth opportunities. In more platform or service-oriented teams, the product owner’s customer might be another product team or an internal business user. The outputs may skew toward KTLO (keep the lights on), but the mindset—proactive, accountable, value-driven—remains the same.

(For more on the foundational differences between project and product models, check out my earlier piece, Crossing the Project-to-Product Chasm.)

Why product models make technology easier to run—and understand

Beyond delivery, the product model simplifies some of IT’s trickiest operational challenges—starting with capacity management.

With persistent, dedicated teams, it becomes far easier to estimate how much work a team can take on in a given quarter or sprint. You can explicitly reserve capacity for unplanned work, KTLO, or technical debt. And if stakeholders are aligned to specific product teams, they can dial resource intensity up or down based on business priorities, giving them more ownership over their IT investments.

Which brings us to another benefit: transparency.

Traditional IT financials are full of noise—line items for middleware, platforms, APIs, and niche SaaS tools that obfuscate rather than illuminate. But when labor, tools, and infrastructure are mapped to business capabilities, you can start having clearer conversations about total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI).

You’re no longer explaining the cost of seventeen tools—you’re discussing the TCO of the “commerce capability,” and evaluating that investment against tangible business outcomes. You’re speaking the language of the business, not the language of IT.

Aligning autonomy with enterprise goals

Autonomous teams are great—but only if they’re rowing in the same direction. That’s where agile frameworks come into play.

Most product-centric organizations adopt some flavor of scaled agile, whether SAFe, Scrum@Scale, or a homegrown hybrid. At their best, these frameworks create a quarterly rhythm in which product teams align on priorities, identify cross-team dependencies, and secure shared capacity to deliver joint outcomes.

This kind of structured collaboration is increasingly essential as companies shift from selling standalone SKUs to integrated solutions. More and more, business outcomes depend on coordinated execution across multiple domains. That means flattening the org chart, breaking down silos, and embracing shared accountability.

In that sense, the move to product isn’t just about empowering teams—it’s about stitching the organization together in service of something larger.

The product payoff: a better way to build, operate, and grow

At first glance, adopting a product model can feel like a heavy lift. But organizations that make the shift often realize the benefits quickly. They begin to see stronger alignment across business and technology, clearer visibility into where dollars are going and what value they’re driving, and a more compelling environment for current and prospective talent. Because let’s face it: top-tier engineers and product thinkers want to do more than just execute requirements. They want to own outcomes, iterate fast, and see the impact of their work. A well-structured product model makes that not just possible, but expected.

Final course: Don’t overthink the jargon. Focus on the why.

You don’t need to be a certified product manager, or have read every Marty Cagan book, or be a card-carrying agile evangelist to adopt a product mindset. What matters is the outcome: creating a model that helps your organization understand and measure the value of technology, collaborate across silos, and build ways of working that make people excited to come to work.

And like any great restaurant—whether you’re fine-dining or catering—what matters most is that the experience is exceptional. Product models won’t fix everything. But they’ll help you focus on what counts: the people you serve, the problems you solve, and the value you create.