[kyriee]

Product-led typically means "driven by customer needs" but also being able to make the correct trade-offs vis a vis engineering and sales considerations. That is, delivering something that is in line with what you can build and not delivering "value" that the customer is not ready to pay for.

Which can be opposed to "sales driven" where the sales team sold something, engineering has to play catch up, which can lead to technical debt and lack of focus mid-term.

Or engineering led, where the engineering team will decide priorities and might push cool tech demos that will never become successful products. Google being the best example of this type of culture.

Edit: article is terrible. He creates strawmans to sell his wares. As always, beware of consultant blogs.

[Closi]

You are describing customer-led IMO.

Product led is about building the best product, with the “best” taking into account customer wants.

But product is just one dimension of customer needs, and customer needs are fulfilled across all other departments either directly or indirectly. A sales-led company can still be driven by customer needs, so the definition is way too broad.

Also the statement that “product led” means “making the correct trade off between sales/engineering” is too broad. You could just as easily say “sales/engineering led” means “having the correct mix of product”.

[crazygringo]

I'm not @kyriee but I agree with them.

There's no such thing as "customer-led". That's not a common term, or when it's used it's used so generically as to mean pretty much everything.

"Product led" describes specifically what a "product manager" is hired to do -- make trade-offs primarily between engineering and sales (as well as take into consideration management priorities and general user satisfaction, but user satisfaction is only one priority out of many -- and often not the top one, either).

And if "sales-led" or "engineering-led" resulted in business success then product managers wouldn't exist, because they wouldn't be needed. But sales and engineering often have very conflicting priorities, and would result in drastically different products if left to their own devices.

Hence, product-led.