Landing with Both Feet running: What Product Readiness Really Means
Spending ten years inside a company that remained in the top twenty of the Fortune 500 taught me a great deal, not just about scale, but about expectation. The view from inside an operation like that is very different from what it looks like from the outside. It’s easy to imagine a kind of smooth machine, with endless resources and immaculate systems. The reality is messier, more pressured, and above all, relentless in its drive toward growth.
What surprised me most wasn’t the scale of the business, it was how much of that scale was actively built and rebuilt every quarter. The biggest players aren’t simply keeping the lights on. They’re building new product lines, acquiring companies, launching services, and pushing into markets they didn’t even mention six months earlier. And all of this while maintaining an internal standard of readiness that’s easy to underestimate.
In that environment, one thing becomes very clear: nothing leaves the building unless it can compete on day one.
Products Built for Battle, Not Just Launch
It’s not enough to have a promising idea or a prototype that looks convincing in a deck. In those settings, products must emerge from development already shaped to succeed in a live market, with all its unpredictability, friction, and competition.
Before any green light, a business case is expected. Not a speculative one. A “real” one, with costs, timelines, regulatory considerations, risks, opportunities, and most crucially, evidence of market demand, or at least one which is as real as it can be so far in advance. In many cases, that means named customers. Sometimes it means a lead or anchor client already signed on.
This is more than financial prudence. It’s a way of ensuring that by the time a product is ready to launch, the business around it is also ready: the processes, the reporting, the service layers, the people. Nothing can wait to be figured out for the first time later. Market response is expected. Competitor reaction is anticipated. Refinements will come, but the initial release must stand on its own.
And perhaps most importantly: the team that will work with that product is expected to be ready, too. It’s not enough to have smart people. The readiness is operational, they must be trained, supported, integrated, and already executing, by the time the first order is taken. It’s no good sending a bright idea into a sharp market with a team still learning the ropes. You’re not sending trainees onto the field; you’re sending a squad prepared to compete. And you can be certain that your competition will be doing the same. Often their products have already been in the market for some time, their team is already well versed.
Competition is Company-Wide or It Isn’t Competition at All
One of the most enduring lessons from that time is that competing is not the job of a single function. It’s the job of the business. Product, marketing, and sales often get the spotlight when we talk about competition, but the more meaningful edge often comes from places that rarely make headlines. That said, product launches do make headlines, ongoing product performance, more so and Brand equity, though often considered a marketing concern, affects the entire organisation.
A finance department, for example, doesn’t just keep the books. It sets the tempo of the business. If your average debtors days is long, your cash flow suffers. If your invoicing lacks precision, customers delay payments. If your reporting doesn’t surface emerging costs or missed opportunities to reclaim margin, decisions lag. In skilled hands, finance is not just a control function, it becomes a driver of momentum.
The lesson about the competitive nature of the HR function is another unforgettable lesson. Usually seen as compliance-focused or culture-curating, it often holds overlooked competitive leverage. The speed of onboarding can determine how fast a company can scale, which initiatives they can succeed at which ones they might need to let go. The clarity and strength of an employment contract, not just in pay, but in growth pathways and working conditions, can tip a candidate’s decision in your favour. And culture? It’s not what’s written on a glass wall in the lobby. It’s what gets said when nobody’s around. If employees believe they’re heard, respected, and challenged, not just surveyed, word spreads through the industry and the market. The best candidates to fill positions listen for that, and they act accordingly.
In one case, I recall how much difference a simple improvement in internal feedback mechanisms made. Not the flashy kind, not the performative “open-door policies,” but real, structural anonymity. The kind that made it safe to speak up, not just feel like you could. That one change transformed retention in a business unit that had struggled for years. Better retention meant more experienced teams, smoother delivery, and better performance metrics within a single quarter. No initiative, no buzzwords, just listening better.
Building Products for Resilience, Not Just Launch Velocity
There’s often a rush to go to market quickly, and sometimes understandably so. But speed without structure can be expensive. In my experience, the most enduring products were not the fastest to launch, but the best prepared to adapt. Readiness wasn’t just a matter of ticking off the pre-launch checklist. It was structural. It was designed into the process early, sometimes before the first line of code was written or the first prototype tested.
This readiness often came down to cross-functional alignment. Take legal, for example. It’s not unusual for legal to be a bottleneck, but in high-performing teams, legal was integrated into development from the beginning. That meant fewer delays, fewer rewrites, and critically, fewer compromises under pressure. Through early involvement in product development and with a focus on regulatory requirements, Legal helped shape the product, not just sign off on it. Pragmatic rather than failure proof service or product contract drafting can make the difference between the provider which gets the signature and the one that doesn’t.
Customer support? They weren’t given the product the week before it launched. They were part of its shaping. They tested assumptions, submitted requirements and helped shape the services around the product. They flagged risks that hadn’t been caught with the benefit of practical experience. They built FAQs while the product was still in development. The same went for IT, logistics, and supply chain. Everyone played a role early, not because of idealism, but because it made the launch easier and the ongoing supply and support of the product more durable.
And it mattered. Because once the product was live, it needed to absorb real-world chaos: unexpected regulatory shifts, competitor reactions, scaling challenges, and edge cases that didn’t appear in testing. The launches that held together weren’t necessarily the sleekest. They were the ones with the fewest surprises, the clearest handoffs, and the most responsive structures. The product development process is thorough but it’s the beginning of the existence of a product or product range, and many of these products will be on offer for many years into the future.
Adaptability Is a Team Sport
In one region, we launched a service into a market we thought we understood. We didn’t. The assumptions we’d made, grounded in solid research, began to unravel within the first month. Usage patterns diverged wildly from forecast, pricing had been somewhat high and elements of the offering weren’t appealing in the specific market. The feedback loops we had in place became critical. The teams on the ground had enough local autonomy to start adapting, and because our systems weren’t overly rigid, they could respond without waiting for six layers of approval.
That experience left a mark. What saved the project wasn’t ingenuity or luck. It was the fact that we’d built systems designed to adapt. Reporting structures were light enough to surface issues fast. Decision-making had been distributed early. And because we’d avoided over-engineering in the first place, we had room to manoeuvre when the market didn't behave as expected.
There’s a tendency, especially in mid-sized businesses scaling up, to equate structure with control. But control, when applied too heavily, creates brittleness. The more valuable goal is resilience: the ability to respond without losing shape. That kind of adaptability has to be engineered. It can’t be added after the fact.
Product Development Is Everyone’s Job Or No One’s
Over time, I came to believe that the best product launches didn’t come from “great product teams”, although that helps. They came from organisations where everyone understood their part in making a product successful. That doesn’t mean cross-functional chaos or endless alignment meetings. It means clarity: each team knowing how their work affects the outcome, and having the agency to shape that effect.
In some organisations, operations teams are kept distant from development. But they’re the ones who have to scale the thing. If implementation is slow, or inconsistent, or manually exhausting, the customer doesn’t care whether the feature set is elegant. What they’ll notice is the delay, the miscommunication, the friction in post-sale implementation and ongoing support.
When product is treated as an isolated event , something that belongs to one department and ends at launch, everything downstream suffers. But when product development is embedded across functions, the result is stronger not just at launch, but long after.
Why It Matters
It’s easy to romanticize scale, to believe that large organisations succeed because they have more of everything: people, money, reach. But in practice, it’s rarely about how much you have. It’s about how well each part of the organisation is put to use.
At the highest levels of business, even minor inefficiencies are felt. A two-day onboarding delay affects a three-week delivery timeline. An unclear payment term adds friction to client relationships. A process that doesn’t scale quietly becomes a liability. But the same is true in smaller organisations, just with less margin for error.
The real competitive edge is built not only through standout ideas or standout people, but through systems, both technical and operational, that bring them together to deliver, again and again.
The companies that last, the products that thrive, and the teams that perform, they all share one quality: they’re ready. Not perfectly, not completely, but functionally. And that readiness doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built, deliberately, incrementally, and with the quiet discipline of people who know that to succeed in a competitive environment, every function must be built to compete.